“A Lab for Apologies and Forgiveness” is an ongoing work in which I perform within a multimedia workspace, creating dialogues between disparate entities in order to gain greater understanding of our relationships to each other, land and pollution.

In Version 5, I build a gassing station for the cultivation of anaerobic bacteria. Specifically, this gassing station is intended to cultivate Geobacter Sulfurreducens, a bacteria that transforms radioactive uranium through respiration into a non-water soluble form.

I modeled my gassing station after an air conditioning unit at the SymbioticA lab in Perth, Australia. With this apparatus, I inoculated a single test tube containing soil from the Montebello Islands, the site of the first British nuclear test in 1952.

In my performance with the gassing station, I used documentation of that nuclear blast to set the countdowns to my own gassing protocol, making references to advances in fusion technology and my own problematic process in building the device. Two screens above incubators screened the black-and-white historical film, along with moments of the 1997 movie The Saint and performances from scientists who work with Geobacter Sulfurreducens in Melbourne, Australia. Throughout the piece I lectured on different aspects of scientific research and history, adjusted the gassing station, and physically quoted moments from the nuclear test documentation. The piece lasted about 20 minutes, and consisted of four “Acts of Research:” bubbling the media, putting the cap on, clearing the headspace and inoculation.