Sam Lewitt

More Heat Than Light is a book developed in conjunction with the eponymous exhibitions, co-organized for 2015-16 by the Wattis Institute, San Francisco and Kunsthalle Basel. The work, exhibited at both of those institutions as well as an anonymous Airbnb rental apartment in New York, consists of oversized custom flexible heating circuits, used for environmental regulation in the sealed environments of equipment as diverse as medical equipment and food trays, in satalites and chemical vats. The heating circuits in More Heat Than Light are several times their conventional size, scaled-up and designed to draw their power and maximize the energy resources of the electrical circuits allotted for lighting within the sites they are inserted into. Energy allotted for stable artificial light is converted in this work into diffuse uneven warmth. This process is circumscribed with a strict regime of documentation.^ Each iteration of the exhibition is documented with a live feed from a thermal camera. From this video feed, a single image is taken every hour of every day that the exhibition is open to the public, resulting in thousands of images cataloging the ins and outs of the exhibitions’ h