Coherent Caustics emerges from the interplay between Ranjeet’s and Sarinda’s ways of seeing the world.
Ranjeet first caught the red dot decades ago when working on lasers in a laboratory, and remains entranced by them to this day. Lasers were long derided as a “solution without a problem”, but they have become an absolute necessity for modern life: How else are you going to inveigle your cat back inside the house at the end of the day?
Sarinda is forever losing herself in contemplation of hidden details and patterns in the world, often through her camera lens. In addition to her eye for the world, she has mastered aspects of photography from set up and image capture to processing and display, across domains that include portraits, product photography, landscapes with unusual angles, close-ups of flowers and abstracts in nature.
Soon after they first met, Ranjeet saw a collection of Sarinda’s art photography. In the hopes that they could collaborate, Ranjeet described his memories of the psychedelic photos he’d taken of laser light projected through bits of glass. The description intrigued Sarinda, and she asked to see the photos. Unable to find them, Ranjeet decided to see if he could reproduce the effect. He brought his cat safely in for the night (using the red dot, of course) and then used the cat’s laser pointer to project that dot through a nearby bottle of mezcal. Ranjeet watched as both the red dot and Sarinda’s mind exploded into fringes, caustics, speckling patterns, multidimensional folds, networks, voids and mist.
It took a few more days for Sarinda to set up her camera, for them to obtain a HeNe laser, fiddle with tripods and screens and blackout curtains … and Coherent Caustics was born.