Seeing Sound: Discussion with Hamza Walker and Micah Silver, moderated by Caroline Ellen Liou

Hamza Walker is Director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Recent exhibitions at LAXART include Nikita Gale, Takers, 2022; Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press’ The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity’s Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).

Micah Silver is an artist, writer, and producer. His book Figures in Air, theorizing audio’s social position as a collective temporaneity-propogating affective AI is in its second printing with Inventory Press. Other writings and diagrams on the social dimensions of art and the information economy have been published by Art Los Angeles Reader, ArtEast Magazine, Okayama Art Summit, NUKE, EAR|WAVE|EVENT, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (CDMX), and others. Since 2002, Silver has presented solo and collaborative intersensory installations that use, audio, sound, air, diagram, scent, and sculpture as compositional material. His work has remained interested in how a sense of place or “being present” is constructed in the time-domain by the ear, using the other senses as synaesthetic staging for a listener. In addition to the more speculative, non-financialized work above, he’s the co-founder of Polytope, an international audio scenography collective that consults with museums, exhibit designers, and architecture firms to bridge gaps in the construction and design process where acoustics, audio, and their related infrastructure is often under-considered, limiting the aesthetic possibilities of the building-as-medium for the future.