Electrical Body: suggestions for noticing & making electricity

1. 1. Enter the field. The field is already present.

2. 2. Listen to Audre Lorde speak at Mount Holyoke College, 25 August 1978, later published as her essay ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ (1984): 

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings... the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing... Only now, I find more and more women-identified women[1] brave enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge without having to look away, and without having to distort the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives gives us information and energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama... Of course, women* so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.[2]

Feel your turn on and build from here. 

This will set us free. 

3. 3. Flick a light switch. Remember a river. Let it flow through you. 

4. 4. Learn the word for electricity in five languages. Note how often the word’s source matches lightning, sky fire, a brief and illuminating flash. Eat the truffle that sprouts where lightning struck and seared nitrogen into the dirt. Electricity shapes stars, nerves, weather, memory, Netflix, the MQ-9 Reaper. Locate your emotions within this shared field.

5. 5. Visit the first elder who showed you electricity. Where did the power come from? Where did it lead you?

Meet their  gaze. Hold this charge. Hold it longer. Let it seep into the generous interstitial space between electrons and protons presently recruited to your form. This compulsion across polarity is known to science as the electromagnetic force. 

6. 6. In Arabic and Greek, the word for electricity is shared with the word for amber. Feel free to swap the amber for silicone or the classic, a latex balloon, and rub it against your clothes until you’ve accumulated some electrostatic charge. Feel the noticeable pull exerted by even this  casual assemblage of free-wheeling electrons. This force is stronger than gravity on the order of ten times trailed by forty zeros. This field of enormous force surrounds and permeates us at every moment, but we don’t feel it as long as positive and negative charges hold each other exactingly in balance. 

This field of enormous force makes a body feel solid while atoms are all but empty space. 

Peel back the skin and surrender to formlessness. 

7. 7. Electricity is not a substance. It’s what we call manipulations of the electromagnetic field that discipline very low frequency waves of energy to move along a desired path and dissipate through chosen assemblages while voltage relaxes en route back to ground.

8. 8. Insert yourself into the circuit. With dry skin, you can maintain resistance up to a few hundred volts. Once breached, a current as light as 0.01 amps can disrupt electrical signals from nerves to muscles in your diaphragm and cause asphyxiation. 0.10 amps causes ventricular fibrillation. Above 1 amp is cardiac arrest. 

Stop. This is dangerous. 

All these units share names with white men from Europe. 

Signor Volta, Monsieur Ampère, Mister Joule, Mister Watt. 

Sense into the shape for a new portioning of the whole. Let it have thrilling edges, a vulnerable centre and a name shared with breakfast. Write down terms for this new unit.

9. 9. Go to the outlet where you last charged your cell phone and trace the current back to its source. What fuels these assets for electricity production and distribution? Who owns them? Who consented to the terms of ownership? What is their organisational structure? How does money circulate? Where is surplus harbored? 

This grid may be a labyrinth. 

Notice where pressure accumulates in your body and name it voltage. 

10. 10. Who is your lover who would mirror in you that lurid tension? Take them by the hand. Find a row of transmission lines and go for a walk underneath. At what distance can you feel the electromagnetic field of your lover’s beating heart? 

Overhead, high voltage presses direct current to drift along a few centimeters an hour or alternating current to swish a hair’s breadth back and forth at fifty rounds a second. Nikola Tesla worked to build a limitless supply of free electricity, disseminated to everyone at no cost directly through the air. The US federal Office of Alien Property seized Tesla’s technical papers upon his death in 1943, fearing even his most unrealistic ideas could fall into the wrong hands.

11. 11. Now, raise your tube light into the field. As each of your hairs become an antenna aligning to local cascades of dissipation, the voltage gradient intercepted by the tube excites a downward flow of electrons and sparks light. 

You’ve offered the energy a structure. It glows.

Lower the tube. Swallow the star. The vector shifts path from the tube to your body and down into the ground. 

The light fades out.

Find the setting on your vape pen that unbinds love from sorrow[3] and cashes you out of shitcoin. Together, walk  off into ‘the kind of dark that [E]lectricity wants us to forget ever existed.’[4]

1. 1. Allow your truth the nerve to move into the open and take form through action. 

2. 2. Put on Bad Bunny ‘El Apagón’ (The Blackout). Print the text of the 2025 lawsuit filed by PREPA and the governor of Puerto Rico against Luma Energy Servco, LLC. Print the Enron Internal Strategy Memoranda (‘Death Star,’ ‘Fat Boy,’ ‘Wheel Out’) released to the FERC May 2002. Print Oleta Fitzgerald’s field memo on the 1981 annual meeting of Twin Counties Electric Power Association when Black majority membership of the Roanoke Electric Cooperative voted a third challenger to a white incumbent onto the board, besting attempts to dilute their vote. Print Chapter 52 of the 2017 Economic Review of Kerala State Planning Board, charting wealth generously pooled to complete full electrification of all rural households. Print Article 20 of the 2009 Constitution of Bolivia codifying electricity as a right on the eve of re-nationalisationalising the grid and reversing decades of privatisation. China is building new Ultra High Voltage transmission lines that can travel far enough to link all of Asia into one supergrid, possibly extending to Europe. Lenin once said 'Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.' 

Power organises through structure. 

3. 3. Tap rhythmically with two fingers or the back of your hand along the full length of your bladder meridian, from the top to the bottom. 

4. 4. Set the papers on fire. Extricate their energy and watch it burn. Send this wealth to the underworld bank.[5] Wake a sleeping god. Pour yourself into a whole and sovereign structure that moves power into protection and cultivation of life, that moves power into collective flourishing.[6]

5. 5. Develop a crush on electricity. Draw from what you’ve learned in Week 01 to couple your body with its tendencies. Your capacity for embodied attunement will be the foundation for building and operating electrical infrastructure as itself a practice of ecology. Rather than needing rigid dominance and conformity, components in relational energy infrastructure will move and be moved, led by ongoing noticings, calibrations and felt connection. Refine your practice continually as needed, following the erotic as your deepest, most self-responsible guidepost. ‘The erotic cannot be felt secondhand.’[7]

6. 6. Acquire the hydrokinetic turbine, a submersible permanent magnet alternator, a rectifier, a transient voltage suppressor diode and a voltage regulator. 

Collect ten friends to socialise the costs. Bind power to love and responsibility. You may also join an existing credit union or lending circle (ie. susu, tanda, hui or other ROSCA variant)

Andreas Malm posits that capital privileged fossil-powered plants to supplant earlier hydro-powered plants not because they ran harder or cheaper, but because the portable energy density of coal and then oil enabled swifter, more totalising concentrations of wealth and control while flowing water stayed bound up in negotiation with landscapes and their other users, inherently more decentralised and contingent. In the words of Judith Sayers (Kekinusuqs) on her power plant: ‘When our members complain about rain I always say: “Well, we’re making money.”’ She was chief for fourteen years of the Hupacasth First Nation and lead negotiator on their $14 million 6.5-megawatt run-of-river hydroelectric installation. They created the Upnit Power Corporation and retained a 72.5% controlling interest; their partners are Synex Energy Resources Ltd. (12.5%), Ucluelet First Nation (10%) and Port Alberni (5%).

A commons is not a fixed entity to be utilised, it is won by the ongoing work of commoning.   

7. 7. Carry your bits to swift moving water. Find the point of greatest vertical drop where you can still move well. A waterfall is excellent but not required. At the base of this drop, lower the turbine into the river, brook or stream.

There is ten times more power in the pressure head from falling water than from kinetic energy in flowing current. Dams and run-of-stream penstocks collect and concentrate this vertical thrust, but also require fixed walls to trap and canalise the water. Forgo that potential. The river runs free and you’ll collect what energy you can. Your work is sensing to the point of greatest intensity, positioning your turbine to draw there, and adjusting when it moves. 

8. 8. There is a lot more to say about anchoring and linking all the components of your hydroelectric generator into an assemblage with each other, with the river, with you. 

You’ll figure it out. Don’t stress. Spiral. There’s a crucifix hung around the dynamo and an Angel in the Server Room.[8] 

s   p     i     r     a     l 

9. 9. Pump three sodium ions out over the membrane of the last cell you needed. Spiral two potassium ions in. Eliminate pretenders. Polarity is now refreshed. Your cell rests in slight negative charge, around -70 millivolts. 

10. 10. Back on land, ground your generator to safely draw electricity. Per IEC 60364-5-54, drive the copper-bonded rod vertically into ground like a stake.

When damp and not frozen, the surface of the earth conducts and dissipates, maintaining a generally negative charge. 50km overhead, the ionosphere is positively charged by passing solar wind. Between these conductive layers, insulative atmosphere collects charge from thunderstorms (40,000/day), passing current up and then back down through fair weather. Within this concentric capacitor, an electric field rises from ground a hundred volts a meter, mounting to 300,000 Volts. Someone named this the global atmospheric electrical circuit. It could use a better name. 

11. 11. Stand on the surface of the earth. You match its conductivity and join the dipole. The voltage gradient arcs around you  and leaves you in peace, minding your business. 

12. 12. Plug your cell phone charger into the circuit field. Wade back out into the water. You are already in the current of post-work energetics and the audacity to move unimpeded towards life.                                             love 

[1.] see: Radicalesbians, ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’, manifesto distributed during the Lavender Menace protest, NYC, 1970.

[2.] Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, in Sister Outsider, Crossing press, Berkeley, 1984,p. 54–55.

[3.] Jackson Crawford (@norsebysw),Twitter, 13 April 2016: ‘“I’m not really supposed to do this,” says the Verizon employee, showing you the setting on your phone that unbinds love from sorrow.’

[4.] Anna Patchett, These Precious Days, Bloomsbury, London, 2021, p. 276.

[5.] see:莊子,Zhuangzi(5th–3rd c. BCE)

[6.] see: @softmoonrose,instagram post, 2025.

[7.] Lorde, p. 59.

[8.] Henry Adams, 'The Education of Henry Adams', Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 1907; Thomas Max Turnbull, ‘A Planetary Battery’, Environmental Humanities, 1 November 2024, 16 (3): p. 643–660; Hortensia Mi Kafchin. 'Angel in the Server Room', 2020–2022, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm

Sarah Kantrowitz is an architect for collectivist, relationship-based industrial infrastructure. Petja Ivanova is an artist and performer dreaming closely with sacred waters. Together with others they are building a geothermal power plan