Title: Lighter 9 — The Note Without Edges

Lighter 9

There is a moment before sound exists.

Before a note is struck. Before a voice opens. Before intention becomes vibration. It is the instant where possibility gathers inside the hand.

Lighter 9 lives inside that moment.

What appears to be a lighter is not simply an object—it is a slide. On a guitar, a slide removes the boundaries between notes. There are no frets. No fixed positions. Pitch becomes continuous, fluid, infinite. You are no longer choosing a note—you are traveling through sound.

That matters.

This image is not about flame. It is about unbounded pitch. About sound without steps. About movement between notes instead of arrival at them. The slide allows the guitarist to pass through frequencies that are not normally accessible, creating tones that exist between the expected and the unknown.

That is the true subject of this piece.

The hand is real.
The guitar is real.
The slide is real.

But the edges are not fixed.

Using what I’ve been developing as my micro-edge, the form dissolves almost imperceptibly into the surrounding black. Nothing is cropped. Nothing is framed. The subject is not contained. It emerges, transitions, and releases into space—just as the slide releases sound from rigid structure.

This is what I call referential abstraction: the physical world remains recognizable, but its boundaries soften. The object is still there, yet its meaning is no longer limited to what it is. It becomes what it does.

The orange micro-burst at the wrist is not decoration. It is not “sparkle.” It represents energy leaving the body—the moment of transformation. Not fire from the slide, but motion through sound itself. The slide does not create tone. It reveals it.

And the black surrounding the form is not background. It is silence. It is the unplayed frequency. It is the space where sound has not yet entered.

This work exists within my ongoing exploration of “without square”—art that refuses containment, refuses geometry, refuses edges that say where something must stop. Just as the slide has no fixed pitch, the image has no fixed boundary. It does not sit inside a frame. It breathes into the void.

In Lighter 6, the guitar is present but not dominant. The slide is visible but not the focus. The true subject is continuity—the smooth, unbroken movement between states. Between silence and sound. Between one note and the next. Between what is defined and what is still becoming.

This is not an image of performance.
It is an image of possibility.

A note without edges.
A sound without borders.
A moment where art is no longer fixed—but free.