Ecobiont
2023, video, asynchronous audio
Soil to Skin, exhibition catalog, Silber Gallery, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD, 2025
Ecobiont is a triptych of visual stories focused on the physical labor and maintenance involved in scientific research, featuring scientists and staff at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology in Baltimore. Ecobiont focuses on three parts of the sustainable land-based aquaculture system being developed at IMET, which due to massive overfishing and the collapse of fish populations around the world, will likely play a large role in how humans obtain fish for food in the future. The Ecobiont ‘stories’ are each presented across four panels that compress and interweave different time periods and spaces. Ecobiont: Life/Death focuses on the cultivation of Dicentrarchus labrax (European seabass), considered to be the most important fish currently cultured in the Mediterranean. Ecobiont: Maintenance focuses on the continuous upkeep required for the infrastructure of the Aquaculture Research Center at IMET, a huge recirculating operation with mechanical and biological filtration and life support systems for specific species conditions and experiments. Ecobiont: Regeneration features the final part of the system: the cultivation of microorganisms to generate energy from fish waste.
