Erika Blumenfeld
Encyclopedia of Trajectories
Encyclopedia of Trajectories is a work-in-progress by Houston-based transdisciplinary artist Erika Blumenfeld. Her installation at the BioScience Research Collaborative at Rice is comprised of 132 drawings based on meteor events recorded by the NASA All Sky Fireball Network, a system of 17 cameras across the United States which record the brightest meteors shooting across the night sky. Each trajectory is gesturally performed on watercolor paper with 23.5k gold, a material chosen for its celestial origins as the byproduct of neutron star collisions, which arrived to earth by meteor bombardment in the early formation of the Earth. Blumenfeld is currently an artist-in-residence at NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Department and is the recipient of a 2018 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency.