Curated by Remina Greenfield

Produced by Tony Tirador

There are signals that move through the world uninvited by scientific method. Some pulse through ocean sediment; others hum just beneath the skin. They arrive not as statements but as sensations—too faint to register as information, yet too persistent to ignore. Frequencies We Can’t Yet Name gathers artists attuned to these interstitial fields, where perception is not a means of knowing the world, but a condition for inhabiting it otherwise.

In dominant scientific frameworks, perception is often imagined as neutral—a transparent conduit through which the world is observed, measured, and acted upon. The observer remains separate, just outside the field of consequence. But perception is never neutral. It is trained, disciplined, and designed. It is shaped by systems that decide what is allowed to appear, and by what those same systems render invisible. In this way, the fantasy of detachment licenses knowledge that evades responsibility. Perceived from a distance, the world becomes available for extraction, manipulation, and control. Neutrality, then, is not the absence of bias but a structure that makes violence permissible by disguising it as observation.

Botanist and Citizen Potawatomi Nation member Robin Wall Kimmerer recalls asking a professor why asters and goldenrods appear so beautiful together. The question was dismissed—beauty, she was told, had no place in science. Yet the contrast between violet and gold increases pollinator attraction and both flowers’ reproductive success. The perception cast as irrelevant was, in fact, ecologically essential. Beauty, far from incidental, was embedded in the system’s operation.

The artists in this exhibition begin from a similar recognition: that sensation, pleasure, pattern, and affect are not aesthetic excesses but legitimate forms of inquiry. Their practices do not simulate objectivity; they reject it. The artist’s body, the rhythms of the nervous system, the dynamics of attention—these are not distractions from knowledge production but its ground. Perception here becomes both method and material: a mode of contact across human and more-than-human systems. To perceive otherwise is not merely to interpret differently. It is to reconfigure the terms of relation—to refuse the frameworks that produce disconnection as a condition of understanding.

Philosopher Sylvia Wynter has argued that the dominant concept of the human in Western thought—rational, disembodied, extractive—is not universal, but historically constructed. This figure shapes how knowledge is produced, and who is recognized as a knower. For Wynter, heresy is not mere refusal; it is an act of world-making. To break with the given is not simply to reject a paradigm, but to begin building one’s own.

The artists in Frequencies We Can’t Yet Name embrace heresy as method. Their works do not illustrate knowledge; they generate it through transmission, reflex, repetition, and resonance. Across digital systems, meditative protocols, kinetic structures, woven archives, and ritual writing, they insist that perception is not peripheral. On the contrary, it is infrastructural. It shapes what can be known, and who gets to know it. The artists here tune us into frequencies we don’t yet have language for—frequencies through which a different world might begin to make itself felt.