The Remediation Station (2018)
In collaboration with Josh ArcherThe Remediation Station is a do-it-yourself decomposition laboratory. Its main objective is to remediate the mind and body of the toxins from chemical consumerism. The station is made of 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% remediated motor oil. It is a bike powered generator that turns fuel into food, mass media into music, monocultural corn into mycological diversity, and control into chaos. As the operator (Remediator) pedals the bike, they are implicated biologically as the station’s power source, and as living gas exchange intermediary.
The Remediation Station is our way of working towards a healthier future, where mass production and consumption are not the focus of our society. Pulling from assembly lines factories, digestive tracts, exercise equipment, industrial agriculture, and medical tools, this human powered machine digests the toxic materials of the present to transform them into nutritious materials for earth and human future.
Now, this process is not simple. The process involves drawing parallels between what we eat and what we consume, biologically and psychologically. It also involves chemically transforming motor oil, a toxic hydrocarbon, into benign nutrients. This is the beginning of The Remediation Station narrative - a family of corn supported by the oil industry and raised by the mass media.
The process begins by redirecting the flow of daytime television wherein blue corn seedlings consume adds and commercials with photosynthetic aspirations. Simultaneously, the slow siphoning of motor oil and water begins traveling throughout the Station, grazing the Remediator’s cranium. These liquids converge in a tub of hungry pearl oyster mycelium. In time, the mushrooms break down the motor oil into smaller, less toxic chemical compounds. This process of mycoremediation is then sonified by the rotating musical garden, which in jug band style, plays the liquid remains in laboratory jars. Personifying a locomotive engine - “choo choo” - the final stage of The Remediation Station is musical score to the revolution of remediation technologies.
