I’ve been following the discourse around why or why not the rise of artificial intelligence is inevitable. Rather than pick a side in the AI debate, I’ll insist on siding with our most precious natural resource: water. Water cannot advocate on her own behalf; she’ll never have a seat at the table in business or government hearings, unless we channel her with our voices. This essay will center on the work of Philadelphia-based performance artist Martha McDonald, touch on water-adjacent performances by Kelly Akashi (Altadena) and Kiyo Gutiérrez (LA River), and the ritual practice of mourning. McDonald’s performance uses an aesthetic of powerlessness by becoming the Schuylkill River. Her public lament acts as a form of water advocacy for both human and non-human flourishing.
To begin, Martha McDonald is a time traveler: her voice, a portal.
I attended McDonald’s performance River Ode: The Schuylkill Freed on May 30, 2026. It was one of those beautiful Philadelphia spring days. Before entering the Fairmount Water Works building, one passes people on their wedding day, professional runners, children, and the river herself, subtly flowing in the background of all our lives.
“A lot of people in Philadelphia don’t know how the Water Works worked, and what it was, what its significance is in terms of the history of water supply in the United States, and the history of technology in the United States,” stated historical consultant for the Philadelphia Water Department, Adam Levine, in an interview in 2015.
These hydraulic technologies, as well as folk histories of river life and the story of the Schuylkill herself, were central to McDonald’s performance. River Ode was performed twice by McDonald through Philadelphia Sculptors as part of the Currents exhibition on view now through August 8, 2026.
While many Philadelphians don’t know the history of how water technologies channeled water into homes, I’d argue that most people don’t understand how current water technologies work either. I certainly didn’t until this essay. Many of these technologies are hidden from public view. Philadelphia Water published a documentary about the history of Fairmount Water Works, highlighting how, at the time, the technology provided an accessible, clean drinking water solution and also prevented hundreds of accidental fires each year.
Upon entering the historic Water Works building, one walks down a flight of steps, meandering through tunnel-like corridors of the once-operable hydraulic engineering marvel, now a site of architectural history and education. Guests arrive and sit on bleachers overlooking the abandoned John B. Kelly swimming pool.
River Ode opens with McDonald’s human voice in the distance. She begins with the song, Invocation:
“I am the wind rushing over the river.
I am the tide that caresses the shore.
I am a leaf swept along in the current,
Tumbling and swirling in the falls as they roar.”
Her voice vibrates like an echo, like a ghost returning from a voyage overseas and centuries, to tell us a story.
Hauntingly, McDonald’s work immediately reminded me of a performance that took place days prior (May 23-24, 2026), called Field Set in Altadena, California, at the site of artist Kelly Akashi’s former home and studio, which were lost in the January 2025 Eaton Fires. Field Set was a collaboration between Akashi and Phil Peters. Peters had been recording Akashi’s property since May 2025, capturing the sounds of demolition and nearby rebuilding in the wake of the fires. In addition to Peters’ three-hour durational soundscapes, each day concluded with performances at 5:45 p.m. by artists with ties to Altadena: Celia Hollander, Paul McCarthy, Alex Stevens, and John Wiese.
I spoke with Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Remenchik, who attended Field Set:
“Walking through the ruins of what once was Akashi’s home and studio, Peters’ recordings filled the air, the bass moving through your chest and bones. The sound didn’t describe the aftermath of the fires; it conducted it through you. There’s no metaphor; it’s just the body knowing what happened here.”
In River Ode, McDonald’s raw—yet all the more glorious—voice was like the bass moving through your chest and bones. There is no microphone used for amplification. Her work is a lament in a place that once held water. Turbines used to spin up 22 million gallons of water daily, flowing into wooden pipes across the city, nourishing it with life.
Her body emerges from the corridor, and she walks very slowly. It’s like a funeral march. She continues to sing.
The train horn sounds in the distance.
I’m taken back to the night of the Eaton Fires in Los Angeles, where there just wasn’t enough water to be found. Thousands, including myself, evacuated, knowing things would never be the same again. I remember angry winds and ash falling from the sky. Helicopters. Firefighters exposing themselves to god-knows-what-kind-of-chemicals. Then I thought about the men who must have worked this waterworks turbine all those years ago. It caught fire two separate times, the boiler exploding. So many working-class laborers forever remain faceless, nameless.
Water can feel like a given in Pennsylvania. Our watershed plays a crucial role in the ecosystem, not just for Pennsylvanians, but for neighboring states. The Schuylkill and the Delaware River are water conduits for the entire region. If anything, flooding is more of a problem than a lack of water.
In January 2026, the United Nations declared that the world had entered an era of 'global water bankruptcy,' with some four billion people facing severe water scarcity at least one month a year. Data centers are quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing drains on that supply. A single large facility can drink as much water as a town of fifty thousand.
Nearly half of Philadelphia's drinking water comes from the Schuylkill, drawing in at the Belmont and Queen Lane treatment plants. It is already a stressed river, running as much as 60 percent treated wastewater in dry stretches. Data centers often use water to cool their servers; this water turns to vapor and doesn’t return to the river. Data centers proposed upstream of Philadelphia sit in the Schuylkill watershed, meaning they’d draw from the same river system the city drinks from.
After living in Los Angeles for over seven years, I always wondered how water could flow to my shower and to the millions of other residents across the region. In reality, much of the water is piped from hundreds of miles away, from the Colorado and from the Eastern Sierra.
Having once been home to the grizzly bear and cougar, the LA River now resembles more of a concrete channel than a natural, wildlife source. Many groups are actively working to restore it to its former glory, like FOLAR and Clockshop LA. And in sections of the river, concrete has been removed to allow wildlife to reemerge. I’ve biked by many times and seen a blue heron wading in its banks. On May 22, 2026—just days before Philadelphia’s River Ode performance—an oil spill occurred in the LA River. At least 25,000 gallons of crude oil from a ruptured pipeline poured into the water. Nearly 80 birds were oiled, and at least 11 died or were euthanized. A little over a month later, on June 28, 2026, Clockshop hosted a performance piece called spawn by Kiyo Gutiérrez in collaboration with Eva Aguila. It was set along the inclined riverbanks. Framed as a ritual-performance, spawn honors the Pacific lamprey, an ancient fish once abundant, now locally extinct due to the pressures of urban development.
Gutiérrez shared this about the project:
“The river needs our love and support, especially now. In recent months, both the river and the communities that care for it have endured painful events, including an oil spill and the contamination caused by the Lineage warehouse fire, both of which affected the LA River. Returning to the river at this moment felt like a small act of care and solidarity.”
Where McDonald’s River Ode laments and also celebrates the resiliency of the Schuylkill River, Gutiérrez’s spawn honors an extinct LA River species while also inviting the community to reimagine new possibilities. And Field Set by Akashi and Peters acts as the rawest of the three: a soundscape inviting the public onto an artist’s private property, to bring in more witnesses to aid in ongoing communal grief. Together, these performances highlight the fragility, temporality, and vulnerability of our waterways and ecosystems.
Inside Philadelphia’s Water Works, the walls are worn. There are many windows through which one could gaze at the river rushing. McDonald’s dress, designed with textile scholar Kelly Cobb, was dyed to suggest the swirling waters of the Schuylkill.
“I wanted my costume to reference the classical garments worn by William Rush’s river goddess but also to transform me into the river herself as I wound my way through the room where water had once flowed through massive turbines,” stated McDonald.
And winding her way, she does. Water can’t be folded, only channeled.
There’s a certain humility in McDonald’s dress; it looks almost like an undergarment. It’s not form-fitting. It’s modest and refuses to comply with Rush’s fantasy. Rush’s original sculpture of The Schuylkill Freed used a female body as an allegory to represent the waterwheel machine. What’s depicted in Rush’s sculpture is a classical odalisque reclined, a busty woman in a form-fitting dress lounging alongside the waterwheel. Behind her, water gushes from a vessel. This image of a docile, compliant woman has long been a fixation in male fantasy. Historically, men have used this allegory of a river nymph to subjugate or validate their desires to control the river for their own pleasure or profit. And McDonald is not having any of that.
I think about Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz’s more direct and confrontational performance, In Mourning and In Rage, in Los Angeles in 1977. This piece was in response to the “Hillside Strangler” media spectacle that sensationalized female victims’ lives and created a climate of fear. Where McDonald’s performance activates water as a female victim, Lacy’s work invoked ten very tall women robed in black, like 19th-century mourners. The performance successfully generated significant press, causing City Council members to voice support, and the Rape Hotline Alliance pledged self-defense classes.
In Douglas Crimp’s Mourning and Militancy, he argues that mourning and activism are not opposed, and that unmourned losses produce melancholia and political paralysis; a movement requires both. Within the simple, elegant craftsmanship of her dress, was McDonald also arguing this? Who will mourn the losses of the working class and our rivers?
She sings a staccato-like chant, Building as Machine, in which she uses mallets to strike handmade glass gongs hanging from the ceiling. McDonald’s lyrics depict the Water Works when it was once in motion, pushing water up the hill into a basin that held the city’s water, where the Philadelphia Museum of Art now reigns. With the glass gongs still rocking, she swirls around the corner, sits on a wooden stool, and begins to play a wooden instrument called an Appalachian Dulcimer. She sings a folk river song she wrote called The Schuylkill Rangers, about real-life pirates from Grays Ferry. Part of the song goes like this:
“Oh, chasing gold and riches,
They lined their pockets well,
Raiding wharf and warehouse
Like bats straight out of hell.”
Not unlike the Grays Ferry pirates, there’s something shady (and terrifying) happening with the rise of AI data center development across the nation. However, the Grays Ferry pirates McDonald acknowledges were poor Irish river thieves, not billion-dollar private developers, or owners of industrial monopolies like the railroad. There lies the class problem at the heart of this essay. Within the song, she sings:
“Now can you really blame them,
What else could they have done?
Brutal toil and low wages
Of the mines they tried to outrun.”
Having moved back to Pennsylvania, in part, because of the 2025 LA Fires, I’ve found myself smack dab in a different kind of foreboding water crisis, where developers have submitted proposals for at least 23 hyper-scale data centers across the state, with little say coming from Pennsylvania residents.
If it weren't for the yard signs protesting the East Whiteland data center around my community, I might not know it was happening in my own backyard. These developers operate under the radar, out of the public’s sight, often until it’s too late. In the case of the East Whiteland scenario, the developer downplayed that the site remains an active Superfund site, with contaminants still above cleanup goals. The township approved the project, and the developer’s work began, until neighbors reported dust plumes rising off the ground. The township ordered a temporary halt for EPA review. The battle is certainly not over.
Where the Grays Ferry pirates stole cargo and were hunted, these data center developers buy up cheap, contaminated land, hire working-class labor to do the dirty work for them, and turn their heads when the community’s water source turns brown.
There is silence before McDonald plays the glass armonica. She wets her fingers in a glass bowl, like before prayer or entering a sacred place of worship. She sings Lament of the River, a story of how the Schuylkill entered a season of overdevelopment:
“They dug canals and locks in me and hollowed out my banks
To float their barges on my back, carry timber, coal and shanks.
They dumped their factory waste in me ‘til I ran black as coal.
Amid the offal, paint and dye, I nearly lost my soul.”
Philadelphia-based artist Charles Jarboe built the glass armonica she plays. Originally invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761, this historic instrument-turned-contemporary-art-object invokes the United States’ Semiquincentennial and conjures Franklin, a Founding Father.
The freeway roars in the distance.
In this space, there is momentary stillness.
She begins playing the armonica, and it’s almost like a keyboard. It sounds eerily like strings. It spins like a lathe, or like a turbine.
McDonald has long been fascinated by history, memory, impermanence, and the loss of things over time. In previous works, she explored how Victorian mourning culture provided society with tools for dealing with longing and ache. While living in Australia, she saw a catalogue for an exhibition called Black in Fashion: Mourning to Night at the National Gallery of Victoria and was inspired by an essay called “The Luxury of Woe.” Where Victorian women spent significant money and time crafting their grieving gowns and performing grief rituals, in River Ode, there’s a lack of ornamentalism while still holding faithfully to the labor of handmade craftsmanship.
The term “luxury of woe” can be found in Thomas Moore’s poem Anacreontic, written around 1801: “Weep on; and as thy sorrows flow, / I’ll taste the luxury of woe.” Essentially, it positions mourning as an indulgence that not everyone can afford.
In closing, McDonald sings:
“The river waited, oh, she waited, singing her quiet song.
She waited mourning, waited night, waiting for so long.
She kept our secrets and our stories, whispered on the breeze,
Our sad confessions, our hopes and yearnings, bore them out to sea.
Then something shifted and someone lifted the sorrow from her eyes.
They dredged her bed and cleared her head so once again she could rise.
The fish and snake came back to the river, lovers and children found her charms.
Then late one night when the moon was full, a river otter swam into her arms.”
Return of the Otter is a testament to the resilience of nature despite man’s attempts to control it. The canals described in her song remind me of the LA River’s concrete channels and the current push and pull of human intervention and natural rewilding. While River Ode is not a Victorian mourning piece, McDonald still sings a song of lament aloud as a tool to help attendees process their own losses. She uses an aesthetic of powerlessness: a plain, handmade dress, and sings a song about a submissive river waiting. Waiting itself is a feminized action explored in the 15-minute monologue poem, Waiting, by Faith Wilding, in which a woman’s entire life is spent waiting: for maturity, marriage, children, aging, and sleep.
She ends the performance with a seemingly cute description of an otter swimming into the river’s arms. Yet, as a new mom, this image is not cute, or wholesome, or happy ending, to me. Here, the river is Mother—once too sick to shelter or protect her young—now she can embrace her long-lost child. There is nothing cute about that kind of reunion. So while I, too, am feminizing the river—unlike Rush’s odalisque nymph—this Mother river has seen trauma, but still chose to embrace, to nourish, and to prevail.
There was never a moment when McDonald’s performance drifted into sentimentality. There was a refusal of mass production and a quiet revolution toward the handmade. Her earnestness was not ignorant, but an understanding that slow study of the past is important for informing the present and the future. McDonald educates and consoles. One wades in her work, soaks it up, even basks in it.
The lathe-like armonica stops with a confident click. McDonald walks toward the audience. The performance ends.
We are made up of at least 60 percent water. When McDonald speaks for the river, could the river actually be speaking through her? Rather than McDonald speaking on behalf of a voiceless body of water—a victim—is she calling us to be the “something” and the “someone” that “shifts” and “lifts the sorrow”?
It’s a luxury to attend a performance like River Ode, Field Set, or spawn. And to turn a faucet on, and clean water flows. Water is not a given.
If you would like to get involved in protecting our community and local waterways, I’ve also put together a Pennsylvania Data Center Fact Sheet.
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Emily Logan is a nomadic art writer and publicist. Since 2020, she’s been building Space On Space. Previously, she worked as a publicist at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and an MS in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship from Fox School of Business, Temple University.
Space On Space is a media movement started in 2020. Originally a cathartic impulse to process the times, SOS has evolved into an investigation into the connections between land, power, and art. The outlet creates content and offers PR services to help artists, designers, and businesses take up more space in the media. At the intersection of art writing and public relations, SOS interrogates the line between myth-making and the historical archive. The publication has produced print magazines and digital content covering artists from around the world. The magazine hosts parties, public programming, and poetry events. In a media landscape built for speed, SOS slows down—because depth is disruptive, and attention is power.
What an incredibly beautiful, moving (in all forms) essay. Thank you.