Cosmic

self-published by Sandrine Elberg

Each book and cover is customized with a unique drawing or design with silver ink.

About the book:

From a literal point of view, it is true that one can be tempted, beforehand, to assimilate these photographs to a long tradition of scientific observation – the images that one believes created by means of the microscope rub shoulders with those which could have been accomplished using a telescope. Some patterns are similar to saturated particles of life or energy; some have an organic consistency, while others are like effusions of matter, electric arcs or molten bodies springing from nothingness. Other circular figures could be associated with portholes belonging to any exploration machine.

However, what really polarizes Sandrine Elberg’s work around scientific principles is based not so much on visual evocations, a global physiognomy, than on the way in which she considers the production of these photographs. Indeed, if the attraction for cosmic environments never fades, it is the whole operating mode that is apprehended in logic comparable to that of the experimental sciences, especially when it is a question of validating hypotheses oscillating between clairvoyance and surprise or to hesitate between conscious invention and chance discovery.

It is that Sandrine Elberg works by trial and error by successive readjustments, playing with variations and combinations, extrapolating the possibilities offered by the silver process, the magnetic particles or any material likely to offer unexpected results, so that these photographs constitute, in themselves, fortuitous discoveries much more than fabrications conceived from scratch.

The work thus results from an oversight, just like Sandrine Elberg, the photographs are initially motivated by a vague mental horizon, an indefinite perspective of what is likely to happen, mere wanderings, just like how the scientist, the explorer or inventor initiate protocols that play with parameters and circumstances, or uncertainties, so that unanticipated results lead to the creation of a new reality, recalling that it is also within these conditions that we discovered America, penicillin or new planets.