Marvin Eil

The Turbulent Flow

Are there parallels between swirling coffee in a cup and natural phenomena that turn into disasters? How do these natural disasters come to be? Sometimes answers to the most complex questions can be found in everyday life situations.

The Turbulent Flow unites micro- and macrocosms, art and science and draws its dynamics from the never-ending movement. It highlights the neglected aesthetics underlying the Fluid Mechanics Films. Aspects of growth, transience and destruction are all inherently part of the endless flow and are the source and cause of turbulence.

The video art installation had its premiere in July 2020 during an interdisciplinary artistic confluence titled "…EN ROUE LIBRE…", organized by Ursula Bertram and Werner Preißing of the [ID] factory FRANCE at the Manoir du Cleuyou in Quimper in the Brittany.

The installation was displayed in an old mill in the park of the Manoir. It contains digitalized footage from the Fluid Mechanics Films that were produced by the National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films in the 1960s and 1970s and used as teaching materials.

Other videos were filmed by Marvin Eil with a microscope in the laboratories of the Chair of Fluidics at TU Dortmund University during a cooperative seminar called "Engineering Meets Art". Beside the scientific material, videos of color stains on floors and tables in the artist studio at TU Dortmund and videos of watercolor dripping into an aquarium were filmed by Dulana Tillmann and Marvin Eil for a seminar titled "Moving Paint" in the Art Department at TU Dortmund University.

The Turbulent Flow displayed on a house wall.

The Turbulent Flow shown in a mill at the Manoir du Cleuyou in France.

"unknown forces and flows
rebellious on the move
from infinitesimal crawl
into infinite swirls

on the walls of the mill
in the grinding stone wheel
tornadoes and whirlwinds
bring blood to the stone

vortices of black coffee
columns, titans slumbering
out of our fears

color seeps out
from the grey
anonymous amoebae
back to life from the void
driven on through time

infinitesimal crawl
and infinite swirls
intertwine in the wind
of the uilleann pipes
slip and vanish
into gaping horizons
like shapeless medusae
down the abyssal depths
of our memories
that struggle and fail
to comprehend
what it is that makes the way
what it needs to bind the stream"

Poem inspired by The Turbulent Flow
written by Lionel Poiraudeau in 2020.

Overview over Engineering meets Art My other works on Mittendrin

Starting point of the project

Found Footage from TU Dortmund’s Faculty of Biochemical and Chemical Engineering (BCI)