ἄσφαλτος — Metabolizing Time, 2023

The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, NY

A 360-degree panoramic film (with an 8-channel sound array) set an immersive environment for a participatory sensorium installation at EMPAC’s Studio 1. The piece explores anthropocene geology and the mutual metabolism that occurs between landscapes and bodies. That is, how our bodies’ are implicated in the extrative practices of the Anthropocene, and the agency landscapes have to return metabolic processes back onto our own bodies (via the consumption of pollutants, geologic materials, and toxins.) The installation acts as an open-ended communal feast, where guests are invited to consume edible clay and geologically-inspired foods, including asphalt caramels, coal bread, edible benonite and kaolin clay, Icelandic tar candies, and coconut ‘gravel.’

The work considers toxins and materials that humans input into the earth for digestion across deep time, and how we ask our own bodies to process geologic materials; clay and dirt have been eaten in almost every culture and time period in human ihistory, and often for its detoxifying or supposed purifying effects.

In the installation, asphalt was situated as a kind of speculative future geology and suggests forms of intimacy with industrial detritus. The word asphalt (asphaltos, ἄσφαλτος) comes from the greek sphállō— “to fall, cast down.”

Asphalt caramels and coconut ‘gravel’ made in collaboration with Primo Chocolates / Oliver Holecek.