Composed of five sculptural instruments, Dark Fringe, is a multi-channel audio installation by sonic and visual artist Jules Gimbrone. Building on Gimbrone’s artistic and theoretical framework, Trans-Sensing, Dark Fringe was born from extended dialogue with astrophysicist Max Isi. Isi’s research into black holes centers a type of scientific inquiry that pushes the edges of human belief and understanding; echoing this, Gimbrone proposes that transness is an embodied perceptual orientation based in speculation. 

Trans-Sensing modalities are methods that trans people—specifically those who identify as transgender, but also people whose subjectivity is unmoored or unrecognizable to the dominant culture—intuitively cultivate to navigate the world. Here, this framework is central in complicating the relationship between signal vs. noise and using the idea of interference to make a “third idea” or “third sound.” 

In science, a “dark fringe” occurs when two interfering waves undergo destructive cancellation; in contrast, Gimbrone’s interference relays a speculative mode of perception— a “third way” made variously visible and audible—to the installation’s audience. 

Dark Fringe invites us to embrace a blurring that is central to trans-sensing as well as the potential of perception to an embodied experience of transness–creating new ways of listening, being, and knowing.