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(LADDER) - present (right now)
It is June, 2017. You’re standing on this ladder: McMaster Carr model 8188T87.
Holding you 7’8” up in the air, and you can feel safe; the powder-coated steel can
bear the load (up to 450 lbs). Its powder coat is probably thermoplastic, a whole genus of
materials that can be shaped, molded, and even made particulate with enough heat. This genus also
fills the Atlantic trash vortex, spinning on the Sargasso Sea like --
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(FIRE SPRINKLER) - present (right now)
-- The water in the Ashokan Reservoir, 100 miles north of here. Flowing downhill, like
blood through your leg. Through an aqueduct, through a UV light treatment plant, city pipes, a
nearby main, up into this building, into this sprinkler. This sprinkler is the valve on an upstate
watershed, waiting to burst into action. At the turn of the 16th century, as Giovanni da
Verrazzano was making the first European contact in New York Harbor, Leonardo da Vinci constructed a
glass model of the human heart. As you gaze at this glass bulb in 2017, you gaze at the key to the
water, the valve, its pressure. Should it shatter, then like a cut artery, it will not sprinkle,
--
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(HANDMADE BOAT) - past (1300)
-- It will spray. Up over the sides of the Massicot, this paper boat, built for the open waters.
Mare Liberum, Hugo Grotius’ legal tract from 1609 claiming the seas are open to all.
Mare Liberum, written for the benefit of the Dutch East India Company. Who sent Henry Hudson
west that same year, giving them their claim to New Netherlands. You’re in this paper boat,
that sailed the Hudson River. You’re in a dugout canoe, shaped from a tulip tree by Leni
Lenape hands, crossing the same river, Shatemuc, in the year 1300. Shatemuc, “river that
flows both ways”. Like a tide, --
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(EXIT SIGN) - present (2017)
-- In the water. At Standing Rock. In Mawah, NJ. You’re there, with the
Sioux, the Ramapough Luunape, the Water Protectors, in 2017. Coalitions of tribal communities and U.S.
citizens have joined together in the water, a symbolic gesture towards the oil conglomerates trying to
bisect watersheds, primary sources of human health, with steel pipelines. These “black
snakes” seep toxins time and again. “LEAVE,” you and the Water Protectors say,
voices bright and hard like an EXIT sign made, per New York regulations, from steel.
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(PORCH PAINT) - future (2525)
-- Extinction. The year is 2525, and humans have decimated most sources of life.
Facing your own demise, you’ve decided to start anew on the Moon. This blue paint, a
relic of more prosperous times, is made with titanium oxide pigment. On the Moon, you’ll be
mining Ilmenite, the mineral source of that pigment, but not for aesthetics. You’ll use it
to make iron, and titanium, for construction. And you’ll use it to extract oxygen, not an
abundant resource up there. When you look back, and see the blue planet abandoned in the sky, will
you miss the water? The water slowly rising, overtaking --
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(80 GREENWICH ST) - past
(1600s)
-- One network laid atop another, wastewater atop wetland. It’s 1660, and you and your
fellow Dutch occupy this island where two rivers meet the sea, an island covered in streams, creeks,
marshes. You hear the cannons at Fort Amsterdam to the south. You’re on the shore of
the North River. You dip your fingers into the wet sand, you picture grasses, a park, streets,
skyscrapers: the land that hasn’t been made land. You’re standing in this spot.
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