Spectral Subjects is a new interactive installation 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.

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.