Micah Silver (b.1980 Sylva, North Carolina USA) is an artist, writer, and producer. He’s the co-founder of Polytope, an international audio scenography collective and runs Black Hole, an immersive listening and production studio in Los Angeles.
Silver’s activities endeavor to produce cultural moments of impact that offer new horizons for our collective attention. If the work succeeds, it illuminates that intersensory composition can park expanded schemas in the visitor by bringing to lived experience, an awareness of alternatives and horizon of possibility.
Silver has created installations, audio works, and diagrams in art, cultural, and educational contexts internationally since 2002. His early installation work explored how a sense of place or “being there” is constructed by the ear, using microphones like syringes to extract and loudspeakers to represent time and presence, relocated. More recent work has been aesthetic systems that center the irreconcilability between the finite and the infinite, the quantifiable, what we can sense, technologies of representation, and how we construct the unknowable in the information economy.
His book Figures in Air: Essays Toward a Philosophy of Audio, theorizing audio’s use as temporaneity-propogating AI (“Listening Beyond Turing”), is now in its second printing with Inventory Press. Other writings on art and social concern have been published by Art Los Angeles Reader, ArtEast Magazine, Okayama Art Summit, Medium’s Politics and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (CDMX).
As an advocate for creators and platforms that elevate experimental takes on listening, music and acoustics, Silver worked with Diapason Gallery (NYC) from 2003-2006, from 2006-12 was a founding Curator at EMPAC, and in 2020 opened Black Hole.
Silver studied music at Wesleyan University and holds a Masters from MIT’s Architecture Department.