ENERGY CHARACTERS
Collaboration between Micah Silver and Jules Gimbrone
Heat lamps, brass, rubber hose, fan, air, audio.
Hammer Museum, Lifes, 2022

This composition of heat comes from our shared desire to elucidate the inherent fallacy of precision in quantifiable data as compared to the messy sensory membranes of the body in interpreting the feelings of energy transfer (sound, heat, movement, etc). What we desire most is invisible. In artworks, in people, in things, in ourselves. The visible is a way to grasp and luxuriate in our senses’ most tuned/acculturated interfaces into meaning, but the momentum of desire is invisible, as is the real of the object.

To work with invisible forms of energy as social material is the baseline for what music is. This is what composers or producers think beyond the design-production of the current music culture. They map ways of listening and what tracing an attentional form with our inner world can bring about.

Working with air, heat, or smell is not to point at the mere fact of how little bandwidth our bodies provide to perceive the planet, the universe, or to point at the marginally perceptible and bring it to the center.

An artwork like this does the opposite, it embraces the obviousness of our synesthesia, the actual unknowability we confront when being full of desire, and the commodification of our senses and reliance on the visual as a quantitative, analytic, correlational design framework to pursue it.

We’re making a diagram of unclear, apparently systemic things that are anti-correlational and anti-causal, though the tools in play ask for this misreading on the surface.