Black Haired Girl Making Soap Bubbles Down By The Lake

Soap bubble performances combine entertainment with artistic achievement. They require a high degree of skill. Some performers use common commercially available bubble liquids while others compose their own solutions. Some artists create giant bubbles or tubes, often enveloping objects or even humans. Others manage to create bubbles forming cubes, tetrahedra and other shapes and forms. Bubbles are sometimes handled with bare hands. To add to the visual experience, they are sometimes filled with smoke, vapour or helium and combined with laser lights or fire. Soap bubbles can be filled with a flammable gas such as natural gas and then ignited.
The French writer Alfred Jarry was highly impressed by physicist C. V. Boys's Soap-Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces that Mould Them and incorporated parts of it into his eccentric novel Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, pataphysician, written in 1898. The book describes the exploits and teachings of a sort of philosopher who, born at age 63, travels through Paris in a sieve and subscribes to the tenets of 'pataphysics, which deals with "the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one". In 'pataphysics, every event in the universe is accepted as an extraordinary event.