2018
PProphet, created for Bay Area Now 8 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts provided a urinal for the public and turned the captured urine into distilled water and struvite, a magnesium-ammonium-phosphate fertilizer critical for plants, which irrigated and fertilized an orange tree growing in a container garden. Oranges and water were served to visitors, illustrating their participation in the nutrient exchange.
The name PProphet hints at several aspects of this cycle. Phosphorus (P) is a critical resource that plays a fundamental role in agriculture, but is undervalued in our current economic system and not recaptured from human waste where it is an abundant resource. For example, in the East Bay, sewage drains to a plant in West Oakland where it is treated; solids are separated and used as landfill cover and on non-food crop farms, which is a good start, but about 60 million gallons of nutrient-rich water is dumped in the bay on the daily-not good for the Bay ecology and furthermore a waste of nutrients and water. PProphet reclaims this Phosphorus, while at the same time, analyzing your urine. There are over 300 variables that can be read through sensors, from how dehydrated you are to what VOCs and chemicals you have been exposed to or consumed. This installation address this feedback loop by highlighting issues of data privacy: who holds the data that reveals these chemical exchanges in our environment and in our bodies and how might they profit from this data?
PProphet is the latest in a series of public urinal projects created in an ongoing collaboration with my former partner, Brent Bucknum. This project was created by Marisha Farnsworth, Brent Bucknum, and Daniel Fleischman for the Hyphae Design Lab.
Photo by Charlie Villyard