Newtown Creek Field Guide, Phase 1:
“Oil Twitchers and Barge Spotters: A Field Guide to Whale Creek”
2017
Field guide, self-guided audio tour, website
Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies (FSDE)
(Nicholas Hubbard, Rebecca Lieberman, Marina Zurkow)
with Bruce Shackelford (voice), Jane Cramer (audio
engineering), Justin Peake
(music)
Funded in part by a Tisch School of the Arts Dean’s Faculty Grant, and the Brooklyn Arts Council
Project website: newtowncreekfieldguide.com
DESCRIPTION:
Focusing on Newtown Creek, the polluted and little-known waterway that borders Brooklyn and Queens, the art
collective Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies (FSDE) aims to expand awareness, citizenship and affection for
this post-natural place that is currently in the final stage of the Environmental Protection Agency’s
Superfund assessment process. We have been concerned with designing site-specific engagements and field guides
that use diverse, creative ways of knowing place, and foster the idea that knowing is loving is
caring-for. Our audiences over the multi-phase project of working on Newtown Creek include the voting
local public, the Industrial Business Zone labor force, the environmental studies community, teenage citizen
scientists, and city government agents.
Phase 1, “Oil Twitchers and Barge Spotters: A Field Guide to Whale Creek” uses the familiar
forms of a field guide and a self-guided audio tour to invite participants out to the Newtown Creek Nature
Walk, one of the few public access points on the Creek (and the fairly unknown jewel of Greenpoint, in our
opinion, designed by the brilliant George Trakas in 2007 for the DEP’s Newtown Creek Wastewater
Treatment Plant).
The Field Guide and audio tour to Whale Creek—the tiny offshoot of Newtown Creek that flanks the Wastewater
Treatment Plant’s Digester Eggs and invites you, even tempts you, lovingly into the Creek’s toxic
waters with its astonishingly resilient fauna and its 25 feet of “black mayonnaise”—lays bare the
power and complexity in trying to name what surrounds you.
PRESS:
