Come. Have a beer.
Now, please pee in a cup.
Well, actually, pee in this small glass fish bowl instead.
We are going to turn your urine into fertilizer you can use on your houseplants and keep your nutrients & all those drugs you’ve been taking out of the waterways.
While you sit on the toilet, imagine drinking from a water fountain at the same time.
Your body is closing the loop. Actually, we all are, every day.
Our menopausal moms pee estrogen supplements into waterways and frogs’ mating cycles de-synchronize. Our neighborhood’s latest strain of COVID shows up in sewage samples. Our grandpas pee blood thinners into the waterways, dosing all of us. Our cocaine binges make their tiny particulate way into school water fountains. Water treatment plants don’t treat for these particles of ours.
There is no flushing our pee away.
Now, dip a pH strip into the pee.
Don’t worry.
It’s sterile right when it comes out of your body.
Go ahead, take a whiff.
What do you note?
Hmm, agreed. His does smell like wet leather and horsehair. Now, add a pinch of this soil enzyme, place it in the ice bucket, take off your gloves, and go dance and socialize for fifteen minutes.
Test the pH again. Note the smell. Ew. Yeah, it’s ready.
Pour in the minerals. Stir. It gets hot and fizzes.
Clumps form. These clumps are kidney stones (thankfully forming outside your body!), but they capture most of your pollutants as well as the rich nutrients in your pee.
Put the filter on. Dump out the now relatively harmless liquid. That will go down the toilet.
That’s your fertilizer!
Gather up the filter into a baggie. Your house plants will love it. They can metabolize your pollution. Now, you are in a symbiotic relationship with your favorite Swedish ivy plant.
You can take this home this DIY Kit and do yourself in the privacy of your bathroom.
Selected Public Reactions
Ars Electronica: Human Nature 2009
Asia Song Society, aka. ASS Gallery (Terence Koh's gallery space), as part of the Expel Programming Series, April 2009. Flickr
CYWTS Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Jan 2009.
Kits & Video Displayed
MOMA Museum of Modern Art in NYC, April 2009.
The New Museum Bookstore, 2009-2010
A+D Gallery, Columbia College, Chicago, IL, 2008
Ars Electronica 2009
Venice Biennale of Architecture- 11th International Architecture Exhibition DomusLab Food curated by Gruppo A12, September – November 2008.