A view of Lunar Sample 60639,0 rotating in the Astromaterials 3D Explorer application. Video credit: NASA / Astromaterials 3D

Houston-based Erika Blumenfeld explains that her art has always investigated ‘the places where our phenomenological world meets the human experiences of wonder and meaning. The extraordinary events which had to occur in order for us to even have a universe, a planet and a habitable natural environment are an unending source of both wonder and meaning; these are the motivations for my creative inquiries.’

Erika Blumenfeld at The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist-in-Residence No. 29 in 2018. Image credit: Mark Poucher — Erika Blumenfeld at The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist-in-Residence No. 29 in 2018.
Image credit: Mark Poucher

Her background fits right in with that: she grew up with parents in both the arts and sciences, and says that ‘the two modes were always co-curiosities'. As a child I loved to draw, paint, play piano and was also in the computer and rocket clubs. Once when I was 14 or so, I took my chemistry and science set outside to dissect the frog that came with it, curious to see what it’s eyes looked like under my father’s microscope.’ Her qualifications are equally dual: Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, Parsons School for Design, New York, 2006 and Master of Science in Conservation Studies, University College London, 2014. Her practice tends to centre on multi-year projects, typically using scientific data to generate sublime experiences, and showing a consistent interest in light and rocks. We discussed three of those: Bioluminescence (2001-11), one of several projects which centre on light; The Encyclopaedia of Trajectories (ongoing since 2017) – an examination of meteors which might be described as rocks meet light; and the rock-focused NASA Astromaterials 3Dproject (conceived in 2013 and carried out in 2014-20).

Bioluminescence

Blumenfeld recalls her first experience of dinoflagellates, the single cell bioluminescent plankton that glow in the oceans, as ‘little balls of light dropping off my skin when I emerged from the water as a girl in Boston’. We are normally aware of them only as a collective phenomenon – whole oceans can seem to sparkle around a boat – and the individuals are too small to see with the naked eye if not illuminated. Blumenfeld later became interested in understanding the phenomena behind the experience. Technically, dinoflagellates contain scintillons, individual cytoplasmic bodies which hold dinoflagellate luciferase, the main enzyme involved, and luciferin, a chlorophyll-derived tetrapyrrole ring that acts as the substrate to the light-producing reaction. The luminescence occurs as an 0.1 second blue-green flash when stimulated, whether by a predator or by a mechanical disturbance.

In 2001 Blumenfeld – working with a scientist for the first time - collaborated with Marine Biologist Dr Michael Latz with the aim of learning how to care for Pyrocystis Fusiformis, one of the most beautiful and luminous dinoflagellates. Her initial plan was to set up a direct encounter by creating a safe environment for them as a living installation. However, they proved ‘extremely difficult to take care of: although they live in a tumultuous environment which can be rough and extreme, they are remarkably fussy about the motion of the water, and they need it to feel natural. They wouldn’t have been sustainable in a large scale installation – which would anyway have been visible for only a brief period during the organism’s night cycle.’ It proved more practical, then, to photograph the plankton using a flow agitator – traditionally used to study flow mechanics – to mimic the dynamics of the ocean.

The resulting images and video work document the bioluminescence of bothlarge populations and individual organisms in real time. It’s a good example of Blumenfeld seeking out natural phenomena as an intersection point. In her words: ‘Art is inherently moved by the metaphorical and symbolic, whereas that is inimical to science. That is the interesting cross-over: by bringing together the subjective and objective aspects of the conversation, art together with science can be an essential balancing-out of our encounter with the world’.

Not only does the dinoflagellates’ combination of visibility and invisibility, day and night, speak poetically through Blumenfeld’s project, they also have a wider significance. A healthy plankton population is indicative of a healthy ocean, but that is being affected by global warming. Blumenfeld explains that ‘in the deeper ocean the mix of currents and water temperatures are changing, which affects the nutrients available to plankton blooms and we have lost up to 40% of plankton populations. That is important for two reasons: they are the base of our food chains, so if we don’t have them, the whole food chain will be compromised; and they produce 50% of the oxygen we are breathing, so losing them has similar impact to tree loss’ – but without, it seems, anything like the attendant publicity of deforestation.

Living Light No 1 (Pyrocystis Fusiformis) 2001/2004, Image 16” x 44” / Paper 24” x 60”, Edition of 15, Published by Santa Fe Editions.

Encyclopaedia of Trajectories

The Encyclopaedia of Trajectories is a project to draw every shooting star that occurred in American skies over a one-year period. Blumenfeld describes it as a double delight: first, because it is hands-on when so much of her work is digitally based; second because it returns her to the very clear nights she misses now that she’s moved away from the dark desert skies of Marfa, Texas. The project is motivated by a desire to express something which has been proved only over the past fifty years: that the components of our bodies came from the stars – or as Carl Sagan famously put it in 1973: ‘The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.’

Erika Blumenfeld, Encyclopedia of Trajectories, 2017-2018, Finely ground 23.75 k Gold in Gum Arabic, Arches Aquarelle Watercolor Hot Pressed 140lb Paper, Pushpins, Magnets, 336 drawings, 10.25” x 14.25,” each; 80” x 746,” installed, Installation vie… — Erika Blumenfeld, Encyclopedia of Trajectories, 2017-2018, Finely ground 23.75 k Gold in Gum Arabic, Arches Aquarelle Watercolor Hot Pressed 140lb Paper, Pushpins, Magnets, 336 drawings, 10.25” x 14.25,” each; 80” x 746,” installed, Installation view: Main Studio at Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, FL, February 2018. Image credit: Erika Blumenfeld

Curious about how many meteors occur in a year, Blumenfeld decided to draw every one, starting from the summer solstice in 2017. That turned out to be 5,763, so initiating an ambitious project which bears comparison with such obsessive art practices as that of Roman Opałka, who spent 1965-2011 painting 5,607,249 numbers onto canvases at a rate of some 400 daily. Even though she completed a thousand in the first year, it will take Blumenfeld several years to finish. Her source is NASA’s All Sky Fireball Network: a configuration of 17 video cameras across the US that automatically record a type of shooting star known as fireballs - meteors that are at least as bright as Venus, the brightest shooting stars we see. The network captures and makes public film and data for each such event – though Blumenfeld suspects she was the only one downloading all the action every day! Multiple recordings are made of each meteor as the various cameras track it, from one of which Blumenfeld studiesthe choreography of that meteor’s unique luminous mark across the night sky.Like snowflakes, she says, each is unique with placement, orientation, thickness and tail providing plenty of scope for differences.

Blumenfeld views the selected film over and over until she feels she can, as she says, ‘perform it’ through a drawing – can ‘embody the trajectory from memory rather than try to reproduce it as a tracing’. Her chosen means is a single stroke, with a traditional ink brush, on Arches Aquarelle hot pressed watercolour paper using 23.5 karat gold suspended in gum Arabic. That’s quite a task for someone with no background in calligraphic mark-making, and Blumenfeld concedes that ‘I initially thought I should study with a master, but once I realised how many I would be drawing, I decided to let the stars teach me.’ And she has indeed found that if she looks back to the earliest examples, she can see how her confidence and skill have increased. When did she realise she was on the right track? ‘To test my efforts empirically and make certain that I was capturing the essence of it, I made ten separate drawings of the same meteor event, without referring back to the other drawings or the video itself. Reviewing the results, the ten drawings were nearly identical—or rather, as identical as a theatre production might be as seen ten nights in a row. There were expected subtle variations between each drawing just as a performance might have subtle variances each time it is performed. Yet the integrity of the subject remained constant and true to its original intended action.’

Erika Blumenfeld, Encyclopedia of Trajectories (Detail), 2017-2018, Finely ground 23.75 k Gold in Gum Arabic, Arches Aquarelle Watercolor Hot Pressed 140lb Paper, 10.25” x 14.25” Image credit: Erika Blumenfeld

Why gold? Because, quite apart from its cultural import, gold arrived through meteor bombardment during the Earth’s formation. Blumenfeld explains that ‘around 3.9 million years ago, there was a burst of meteorite impacts on the Earth—the same bombardment that formed many of the craters we see on the Moon—that brought material formed in other regions of the solar system to the surface of our planet, including gold.’ Moreover, ‘we have recently come to understand that the element of gold itself originates from the merging of neutron stars, which produces a kilanova event thought powerful enough to create the heavier elements.’

The drawings are presented in two ways. First, as an encyclopaedia of the 52 known meteor showers which occur, usually over a few days each – Perseids, Leonids, Geminids etc. These can be traced to particular bodies, mostly comets. Some produce only 2-3 meteors, so that’s a short book. In contrast, the book of 908 Geminids will require several handmade volumes of drawings. That leaves some 3,500 fireballs – 60% of the total – which come from ‘unknown sources’. They won’t feature in the encyclopaedia, but take their places instead in free-floating installations.

NASA Astromaterials 3D

Blumenfeld’s most recent major project carries on from that question of how we embody our cosmic lineage. The starting point was the way in which scientists talking about how the earth was formed would always say, while standing in front of some huge geological phenomenon: ‘the story is in the rock’. Could it be, wondered Blumenfeld, that ‘if you spoke the language of the rock you could read them as scrolls of knowledge’. That fitted in with her interest in the intersection between nature and culture – and its complicated history – and her desire to find ways to thread them back together. So, knowing that we ‘came from the stars’ led her to ask the question: ‘Could I hold a rock in my hand which told the story of the whole cosmos?’

Blumenfeld approached NASA with the idea in 2013, proposing to create a virtual 3D library of their space rock collections for the public. The idea arose while she was working on a scanning electron microscope, which enabled her to look at all the chemical spectra coming up in rocks from outer space – and see for herself that they were all in her own chemical makeup, that ‘there was a relationship between myself and the rock.’ And whereas we’re used to the idea that we are insignificant in the context of the vastness of the universe, that is somehow inverted - because we are part of it, we come from the universe.

A brief demo of the Astromaterials 3D Explorer application showing meteorite sample GRO17063,3 and the interactive features that allow you to investigate the rock’s interior and exterior. Video credit: NASA / Astromaterials 3D

What if people could hold these rocks? Such a direct encounter is impractical, as the Apollo Lunar Sample and Antarctic Meteorite collections are kept in protected vaults. But NASA liked Blumenfeld’s idea of making virtual 3D models of them. Blumenfeld, a rock fan of an alternative sort, recalls that as an initial proof of concept ‘they let me work with rock 60639 - an incredible rock, oh my god! - One of my favourites. My team and I were able to produce a 3D model and correlate the XCT data’ (XCT is a scanning technique used to produce 3D representations of an object by taking many X-ray radiographs around a rotation axis). She explains the appeal of 60639, a fist-sized rock collected by the Apollo 16 mission in 1972, as follows: ‘One side has a surface consisting primarily of glass. This impact melt describes the period in the Moon's history between about 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago when it experienced heavy bombardment of asteroid debris. The rock's other side contains clasts of pristine mare basalt, which tell the story of how the huge craters, which were formed from this bombardment, then filled with magma that flowed upward to the lunar surface, where it cooled to become the dark surface of the Moon we see from Earth. This side of the rock also has a large anorthosite clast, which is literally a piece of the Moon's primordial crust and is the material that comprises the lighter surface on the Moon.’

The Antarctic Meteorite Collection homepage displays an interactive view of the view of the inner solar system where you can select an origin, like Vesta or Mars or the Asteroid Belt, and begin your journey discovering a selection of space rocks fro… — The Antarctic Meteorite Collection homepage displays an interactive view of the view of the inner solar system where you can select an origin, like Vesta or Mars or the Asteroid Belt, and begin your journey discovering a selection of space rocks from each origin. Image credit: NASA / Astromaterials 3D

In 2015, NASA awarded Blumenfeld and her interdisciplinary team a formal research grant for her Astromaterials 3D project, for which Blumenfeld has been both lead scientist and artist in residence since 2016, enabling her and her team to make a virtual library of 60 rocks. That wasn’t easy, as she had to work with the samples while they were inside the nitrogen cabinets in the cleanroom laboratories where they are preserved, using the cabinets’ small observation windows to create high-resolution photographs of the exterior of the rock. Her team also imaged the interior by capturing X-ray Computed Tomography scans of each stone. The final form of the project correlates the interior XCT model to the exterior photo-based model so they exist in a single coordinate system. The result is an interactive 3D virtual library of NASA’s space rock collection, with both exterior and interior views, presented with Blumenfeld’s own detailing of the story of each rock. Premiering in December 2020, Blumenfeld says ‘Astromaterials 3D is as much a rigorous research-oriented library as it is a public artwork, meant to deepen our sense of wonder and knowledge of our solar system through a virtual holding of these rare and remarkable rocks in our hands."

For more on Erika Blumenfeld, please visit: https://erikablumenfeld.com/

ERIKA BLUMENFELD: THE ROCK FAN WHO LOVES LIGHT SHOWS