“Dreamlover” imagines a post-natural world where creatures have evolved that can eat and digest plastics. The plastic eaters roam uninhabited former cities, feeding on discarded anthropogenic material. Separated from context, the remains of human civilization take on new meanings. An unearthed cassette tape becomes a sacred talisman. Can the finder intuit its sound?

The performance features three brightly colored creatures with birdlike headpieces on four-legged stilts. They are intended to honor the mass extinctions of avian species and represent a new age of natural diversity that begins after the last humans have died out. The smallest creature acts as an elder and leads the other two. The work is performed with a layered soundscape of industrial field recordings that I collected from factory production lines. Interspersed throughout are distorted bits of 1990s pop music. Deconstructed and decontextualized, pop music seems to hold religious significance to the plastic eaters.

“Dreamlover” was performed at a former stamping factory in Highland Park, MI. The socially-distanced audience watched from outside. The post-industrial Detroit landscape makes it easy to imagine creatures such as these grazing in overgrown lots bereft of buildings, chasing a stray plastic bag as it blows across an empty street.