I did my residency at the Temple Makerspace in May 2025. The material and technical support was pivotal for my work over the summer and facilitated the creation of new artworks and laid the groundwork for a new body of creative inquiry. The support of the residency carried me through an exhibition, two additional residencies, and into the work that I am creating now.
My research at the Makerspace helped me to further develop my technical understanding of the fundamentals of naturally occurring electricity, particularly in understanding capacitive electric exchange and salt water circuitry. For the past several years, I have been collecting ocean water and boiling it until it becomes salt. There is something impossibly essential about salt. Salt is in the blood, it is electric, a transmitter between cells, critical for maintaining a heartbeat. Salt is a crystal associated with energy healing. Ocean salt water is one of the major ways in which microplastics are consumed by humans and has a direct relationship to a world affected by climate change. The project speculates on climate change resilience by embracing salvage economies and the precarity of our contemporary electric world.
At the lab we used pennies (copper before the year 1982 and zinc after 1982) and salt water to create a voltaic cell which was able to stimulate a buzzer. Electricity in nature has a semi-magical undertone, and hearing the sound produced simply through the salt, copper, zinc, and water felt like connecting to the essence of electricity. During my time at the lab, we hooked up the salt battery to an oscilloscope, getting the opportunity to see the electric charge it produced, and explored possibilities for boosting the charge by arranging the batteries in series.
Another work I was developing involved thermal printers and a point-of-sale system. I like that thermal printing uses heat, not ink, to transfer information. A receipt is essentially a contract that produces an interaction and exchange. With the technical support at the Makerspace, I was able to develop this work, which offered alternative systems of value. I was struck by how the language of electricity overlaps with commerce: charge, current, exchange, net, wire. The sales screen offered the purchase of intangible things like a “connection,” “longing,”or “networks.” Each receipt acts as both a contract and a point of contact. In exchange for a receipt, participants were asked to trade a penny, sorting it into mineral components, copper or zinc based on the year it was minted. As pennies become obsolete, this work reflects on systems of exchange, the lucky penny, value, and contract, using preloaded thermal paper to print images that play with chance and legibility.
Much of this work appeared in an exhibition Salt Body Electric, a three-person show at Bingo Gallery in Albuquerque, NM, with Francesca Lally and Cecilia McKinnon. The exhibition gathered sculptures, prints, weavings, and moving images into a collective grasp for connection through handmade codes and signals. The pennies were used in creating a sculpture and looping poem made with salt batteries for this exhibition. Gallery visitors were asked to trace the words—touch, current, exchange—written in conductive paint, completing an electrical circuit. When the circuit was completed, it activated the buzzer, which played at various levels of intensity, producing sound that fades with distance from the point of contact. The piece explores electricity as a biomaterial. The work is fugitive because of the corrosive properties of salt, and throughout its installation it shifted in color, creating yellow and verdigris water.
I also developed this work imagining a telepathic connection with ants, tuning into a sense of communion with the interior of an anthill. It asks how we might build empathy for life forms radically different from our own. The work included a video built into a mound of salt dough and surrounded by stanchions 3D-printed at the Makerspace. Ants respond to heat through their thermal bodies, navigating the world through gradients of temperature and touch. Grain by grain, they move earth and build mountains, shaping complex worlds beneath our feet. In the face of climate catastrophe, the piece explores how attuning to such sensory logics might expand empathy in a more-than-human world.
The Makerspace also allowed me to purchase radio equipment that I used in a live radio performance for this exhibition, and also for residency opportunities in Boulder, CO, and in Sisters, OR. The live performance entailed being surrounded by 15 radio receivers. Various microphones were hooked up to short-range transmitters, and explored the interference of voice, competing frequencies, and prerecorded sounds. The performance highlights the spiritual and unknown aspects of technology and our enmeshment in the natural world. With the support of the Media Archaeology Lab, I was able to play this work live on the radio at 1190 AM, along with a radio piece I developed called Bug Radio.
I was also able to use the same radios for a radio garden at Pine Meadows Ranch in Sisters, OR. At Pine Meadows Ranch, which is a residency on a functioning cattle ranch, I attempted to speak to other species and created a radio garden where participants were given radio receivers and guided through a series of listening stations with short-range transmitters, which facilitated dialogue with the natural world.
Now I am currently working on a zine about interspecies communication for the Media Archaeology Lab as part of their Other Networks series and looking for ways to develop this accumulation of artworks into a cohesive body of work to show in the next year or so. Thank you so much to Hannah Tardie and Logan Crampton for the amazing support in making these works possible. The Makers Space is an invaluable resource at Temple thank you for hosting me. -Jazmyn May Crosby
