'Spectral Subjects' Interactive Installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville to Feature Xenics Dione LWIR Cameras

SPECTRAL SUBJECTS BY RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER

A New Interactive Thermal Observatory Piece Transforming the Atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville

Spectral Subjects is a new interactive installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer of Antimodular Research, designed to transform the Atrium of the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville. The piece is a thermal observatory, showing a constantly updating map of the room's temperature on three colossal wall-projections.

Using state of the art Xenics Dione thermographic cameras, the project detects heat and cold in the environment, including the building’s air circulation and ventilation, visitors’ body heat, and inanimate objects. As temperature is detected, the artwork generates a particle system that is a visible manifestation of its dissipation in the museum, showing, for example, how body heat emanates outward and away from visitors and is exchanged with the cooler, air-conditioned atmosphere.

The Xenics Dione thermographic cameras involved in this installation are high-resolution long-wave infrared cameras, featuring state-of-the-art uncooled microbolometer detectors and onboard image enhancement. These cameras feature a 12µm pixel pitch and NETD of less than 50 mK, and are ideal for a wide range of applications include defense, security, industrial and environmental imaging.

Spectral Subjects Installation

As with previous biometric art projects by Lozano-Hemmer, the piece is a call to think of the human body as a continuum with the environment around us. The skin is not the limit of our body but only its visible limit. Sound, smell, heat, air/breath, biological waste, and even chemical signals in the form of pheromones are constantly seeping in and out across our body's visible limits, our skin, which is incorrectly described as the boundary between the public and the private. Written and oral language, actions, movement, exteroception, are examples of other manifestations of our extension into our surroundings, as are the resulting buildings, songs, environmental decimation, artworks, and the Anthropocene in general.

Spectral Subjects emphasizes the active role of the spectator as an integral part of the artwork without whom the piece does not exist. The work is meant to perform the double duty of acting as a critical materialization of the reach of our society’s technological perception and providing a playful expression of inclusion and presence, albeit inside a society of the spectacle, selfies, and reality TV.

This ground-breaking installation will be featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville in Jacksonville, Florida from December 13, 2024 to June 1, 2025.