Throughout the exhibition Myth of the Organic City, over 18 months, we grew freshwater algae from Lake Michigan in Lake Michigan water, locking carbon dioxide into organic form. Today, we share a harvest that has been air dried and charred through an anaerobic kiln firing.  

We started by thinking through carbon both as a foundation of life on Earth and as a principal driver of the climate crisis, an element that is primordial, omnipresent, life-giving, polluting and increasingly political. At the end of our experiment, we are left with more than “Carbon Black” - an amalgamation of pollutants - metals like barium, copper, lead, and zinc that remain intertwined with the carbon in our char and tell the story of elements mobilized in the Industrial era.

Ground and suspended in solution, we are drawing the depth of the lake. You are welcome to take one portion of the drawing. Each drawing is a visualization of the 150 year history of pollution in the Lake, the record we have, in lake ink. Together the drawing is the depth of the lake, 281 meters and creates a line of poetry 281 words long.  

The Carbon Register is comprised of artists Sara Black, Marc Downie, Amber Ginsburg, and scientists Andy Scarpelli and Sarah Rosengard.

External data utilized for this exhibit/printed on the scrolls are published in Granmo MN, Reavie ED, Post SP, Zanko LM. 2020. Anthropocene geochemistry of metals in sediment cores from the Laurentian Great Lakes. PeerJ 8:e9034 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.9034