Leaky Vessels
Name
Cong-frankcht-smact-arch-2025-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
70.74 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7da8961ce18be07b47c822ef85513ceb
Author(s)
Cong, Frank (Haotian)
Advisor(s)
Barry, Judith
Date Issued
May 2025
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This thesis serves as a written synthesis of my art practice. It starts with Louis Pasteur’s swan neck flask, Robert Boyle’s air pump, the theater of proof, and cabinets of natural historians to discuss the intentional gesture of containment, exclusion, and controlled permeability in scientific containers and the knowledge production paradigm behind them. I argue that these containers possess another intrinsic gesture – to leak – that opens space for social and cultural dimensions to engage. I propose “leaky vessels” as an analytical tool and a methodology that foregrounds the tension between intentional and unintentional in order to attend to the issues of care, belief, and labor that arise within this dynamic. Chapter 2 develops the concept of “leaky” in three aspects – aesthetic intervention, historical residue, institutional sabotage – by analyzing art practices by Eve Andrée Laramée, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, Candice Lin, Maria Thereza Alves, Critical Art Ensemble, and Claire Pentecost. Each case demonstrates how alternative approaches to apparatuses can expose and unsettle the systems of control that govern knowledge authority, allowing seepage, contamination, and embodied histories to return to spaces designed to exclude them. Chapters 3 and 4 turn inward to examine my own art practice, Guardian and The Guarded (2024), RapidRise (2024), and Sweat Dough (2025). In Chapter 3, I discuss the experience of entering the biomaker space at MIT and cultivating animal cells in a pendant, interrogating how care, proximity, and cosmology might challenge the lab’s sterile and utilitarian logic. Chapter 4 discusses the other two projects that operate outside the lab, where I investigate how bodily entanglement with dough fermentation can leak into the broader context of food cultures, labor histories, and symbolic inheritance. Together, these chapters propose a practice that embraces contamination and relationality. Those that leak in and leak out are precisely where new layers of meaning reside.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
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