pre·cip·i·tate

n /prēˈsipəˌtāt/ a substance deposited in solid form from a solution;
v /prēˈsipədət/ cause an event or situation to happen suddenly, unexpectedly, or prematurely.

Scope Collective is comprised of Elizabeth Hénaff, Heather Parrish, Seth Wenger, and myself. Our work emerges from the remarkable microbiome of the Gowanus Canal as demonstrated by Pr Hénaff's research. We draw on the relative notions of toxicity and collaboration, the seemingly unsolvable tensions between concurrent time scales, and what it means to survive and evolve alongside other species in urban environments.

As the second installation and first solo show by Scope, Precipitate expands on Scope: Theater of Collaborative Survival installed at Science Gallery Detroit in 2019. This time we took over Open Source Gallery in Brooklyn and tailored the installation to this unique space to emphasize its proximity to the Gowanus site, turning it into a portal where human and microbial environments come into relative focus.

The gallery was divided by a room-sized sculptural representation of the Gowanus Canal created from waste of the nearby construction industry. On display in the main space were immersive environmental photographic landscapes and a generative quadraphonic soundscape, both composed of overlapping elements of micro- and micro-environments operating at different space and time scales. The narrow adjacent space featured an array of live sediment environments borrowed from the Canal for the month of the exhibit, and a larger-than-life timelapse video showing the spectacular successive landscapes generated by the evolution of a previous sediment sample.