By Zuyva Sevilla

Energy moves through us and beyond us, slipping from form to form, never still. It stretches across steel, rises from bodies, and presses into the air. Heat is a material in its own right, sculpted by every touch and shaped by every presence. It is in the warmth of our skin, in the dim glow of a town at night, in the slow burn of a star an unfathomable distance away. We are entangled in a system spanning the microscopic to the cosmic, where what seems like waste becomes a map of exchange.

Heat is the soft echo of movement, unfolding after the action has passed. It pools in the spaces where we gather, like an unperceived atmosphere of human presence. It is in the clasp of hands—warmth vaulting from one palm to another. In the cold silence of space, heat is a rare artifact. Without matter to hold it, energy slips away, uncontained. All warmth, in time, drifts outward, thinning and slipping beyond reach and measure. But within our atmosphere, heat finds material to shape and be shaped by, clinging to skin and sky. It lingers, absorbed into a choreography too vast to watch in full.

Heat is a signal that something, somewhere, is happening, that we are here, alive, participating. The desert knows this well. Heat bends air into shimmering glass, making the horizon waver. Stone radiates warmth long after sunset, blurring the line between what is solid and what is not. Some traces exist only as distortion—always in motion, reshaping even as they fade.

We cast off heat, shed dust, and move through atmospheres shaped by the energy of others. On a planetary scale, this exchange sustains us; we are warmed by a star while standing on ground built from ancient cosmic debris. The mirage is to think of heat as excess, something to be expelled—waste energy, a byproduct of function, inefficient.

Earth does not differentiate between the warmth of an engine and a body. It takes in all energy, inscribing it into an immutable ledger of movement and exchange. To exist is to participate in an endless cycle of neither creation nor destruction, but redistribution.

Heat is not just an output but a connection—a quiet shout into the cold. It is not waste. It is a reminder that we are part of this choreography—held in warmth, held in orbit, holding each other. 

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Zuyva Sevilla is a new-media sculpture artist whose work deals with the fundamental forces that make our existence possible. He is based in Albuquerque.