Energy At the Threshold of the Visible World

Energy is a scientific concept, but also part of discourse and deeply related to power structures. To borrow the term from Donna Haraway, it is part of the ‘natureculture’ of the modern world; it can be studied historically while it is part of natural complexity and a description of a scalar physical quantity that can be measured, transformed and transferred. Entangled in the physical and the political, thermodynamic and metabolic, geologic and corporeal, extractive and renewable, landscapes and bodies, energy remains a part of the modern world that is particularly abstract and obscure.

Visualizations of energy, past and present, are critical as they translate scientific research and data into other fields, displaying the entanglements of energy. They have the potential to become signs, by bringing together the signifier, the signified and the perceiver. In such images, scientific knowledge and aesthetics go hand in hand, and energy enters the threshold of the visible world.

Already in the 7th century, Isidore of Seville suggested the entanglements of energy, when he wrote that the words color and ‘calor’ (heat) come from the same root in his Etymologies. In the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell’s insights on the nature of electromagnetic waves showed the difference between light and heat to be a wave’s frequency. It is possible to consider the relation between aesthetics and energy, and ask: what color is energy today, for this society and culture?

This exhibition brings together the historical visualizations of energy along with the work of artists and architects reflecting on the colors, images and representations of energy.

With works by Hubert Dobler, Exikon, Barbara Kapusta, Mathias Kessler, Galo Patricio Moncayo Asan and Michael Wang. 

The exhibition was conceptualized and organized by Tülay Atak and Bernhard Sommer with Galo Patricio Moncayo Asan, Malgorzata Sommer-Nawara, Florian Zeif and Daniil Zhiltsov, and with graphic design by Annija Česka.

With special thanks to: Prof. Reinhold Krobath (Holztechnologie), Univ. Lekt. Gerhard Brandstötter, Tilman Fabini, Sami Mandee, Marian Stein

3 May 2024, 17:30

Lecture Constructing Climates by Michael Wang
Response by Baerbel Mueller

Opening hours:

Mon–Fri: 11:00–18:00

Extra Saturday: 4 May, 10:00–18:00

Related event: In conjunction with the exhibition, the symposium building Environments: Architectural Theory beyond a Changing Climate will take place on 3 May at Auditorium, Vordere Zollamtsstr. 7.

Find all info here