Metabolic Rift

Metabolic Rift is a transparent network of scientifically-blown glass chambers and tubes containing black slurry from the Gowanus Canal. This sediment, rich with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, mercury, lead, and the ghosts of tanneries and paper mills, hosts microscopic extremophiles that digest what we’ve discarded, challenging hierarchical organizations of matter and life. The project engages Marx’s concept of metabolic rift not as absence but as presence: a space of activity where new forms of life emerge from industrial capitalism’s residues. The installation occupies a 15′ x 15′ footprint rising to 10′ tall, its blown chambers connected by borosilicate tubing. Suspended by brushed stainless steel supports, the structure evokes both scientific apparatus and industrial plumbing: hidden infrastructures built to separate ourselves from waste, revealing how notions of value and disposability are constructed along axes of power. Working with scientific glassblower Sean Donlon at Cornell, I will create hermetically-sealed environments where toxic slurry, ordinarily buried and forgotten, becomes visible and animated.

The glass, with its associations of cleanliness and containment, stands in tension with its contents: thick sediment alive with bacterial activity, refusing stillness, challenging our desire for sterile boundaries. Living alongside the Gowanus Canal, a superfund site contaminated by petrochemicals and untreated sewage, I encounter waste at concentrated scale. The black sludge dredged during clean-up efforts carries chemical signatures of 19th-century ink factories, machine shops, chemical plants, and oil refineries. I’ve come to understand the bacteria that thrive in this sediment not as contamination but as inheritance: bodies carrying metabolic memories of industrial history. The sound component transforms microbial activity into audible presence. Collaborating with biophysicist Ashley Nord at CNRS and microbiologist Matthew Baker at UNSW Sydney, I’ll translate the movements and metabolic processes of desulfobacterales and pseudomonas putida into frequencies that drive pneumatic systems. This approach recalls yet inverts Rauschenberg’s Mud Muse (1968-1971), where bentonite drilling mud bubbled in response to recorded sounds. While Rauschenberg made industrial sludge reactive to human-generated sound, Metabolic Rift positions microbial life as composer, bacterial metabolism generating the sound that drives material movement.

My relationship with petroleum began in childhood. My grandfather owned a Texaco station. Growing up around oil barrels and gas pumps, I developed intimate material knowledge of smell, viscosity, and rainbow sheen that attracted and repulsed. This personal history illuminates inheritance as both material and molecular, informing my approach to toxins in canal sediment: substances carrying complex histories. This exploration takes on urgency as the Gowanus undergoes EPA remediation that will cap toxic sediment with cement. Metabolic Rift preserves and amplifies these bacterial communities just as they face burial, offering temporary transparency before permanent concealment. Movement becomes the primary text: bacterial choreography translating digestion into material flow, creating a living document that foregrounds motion as meaning.