The installation encompasses the structure’s massive turbine hall as well as the boiler house, where coal was used to generate power for two Curtis steam turbines. Completed in 1907, the Steam Plant powered the city’s burgeoning electrical grid and trolley car system. The plant was originally built on the banks of the Duwamish River, providing a continuous loop of water to heat into steam as well as to cool the condensers. However, only 10 years later, the Duwamish was dramatically straightened for industrial maritime passage, thereby leaving the Georgetown Steam Plant to pump in water from nearly half a mile away.

In this sense, LEVIATHAN RISING is a means of reconnecting the Steam Plant to the river from which it once drew power. The sound piece fills the grand acoustic chamber of the turbine hall with layers of mysterious audio recorded beneath the surface of the river using an underwater hydrophone. Meanwhile, in the long expanse of the Boiler House, photographic images made beneath the bows and sterns of the trans-oceanic barges that port on the Duwamish, are projected at grand-scale.