Divine Portent Joule Brick Factory
a collaboration by Nicki Green & Ashton Phillips
Automata Arts +
Human Resources, LA
September 2025
In September 2025, Nicki Green and I opened a working Divine Portent Joule Brick factory inside Automata Arts in Chinatown, LA. Collaborators, community members, and the passing by public were invited to come into the brick factory to commune with us, these living materials, and the process of metamorphosis, impurification, and regeneration happening inside.
Under fungi friendly purple and red light and darkness, we combined pollution-consuming fungal spores, wildflower seeds, feral plant fibers, wild clay, sand, and damaged local earth to animate this divinely monstrous trans* material: damaged and impure, but vibrant, and built with the seeds of its own regeneration and repair.
We built brick molds from scrap 2 × 4’s and filled them with the myceliated cob mixture. Then, we pressed a “Divine Portent” stamp into the face of each one, so that every brick could carry its monstrosity, its holyness, and its foretelling of ominous change on its face.
We kept watch over these living bricks in the dark for 10 days as the seeds and pollution-consuming fungi inside them came to life and began threading these impure bodies together inside their molds.
We invited as dozen musicians, performers, and friends to come play for the bricks as the fungi and seeds inside them grew. Help them become stronger, we said, so that they may be ready when it is time to take to the streets.
When the bricks had grown strong, we put out a call to our loved ones, collaborators, and community:
Come and help us carry the burden and promise of these bricks. Come and help us hold the weight of their potential and grief. Come stand beside us as we brave a public gaze, passing through danger from darkness to light, to lay them down again in a new refuge: part arsenal, part monument, part seed bank for a different, more entangled, future.
More than 40 people showed up to help. We read to them from Susan Stryker’s iconic essay “My Words for Victor Frankenstein from Above the Village Chamonix: Performing Transgender Rage”:
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie…
Then, we gathered around and collectively lifted these care-fully mixed, molded, and pressed objects of revolt and regeneration. We processed them and ourselves, covered in wildflowers, through the streets of Chinatown, humming a fungi-strengthening drone. The frequencies that collaborators sang to the bricks in the dark to help them grow strong, returned to help us grow strong together.
When the way got too narrow for us to continue together with with our palanquin, we laid down our shared burden and picked up the bricks by hand. Each processioner grabbed a brick or two or four and continued over and around the obstacles. Flowing like water. Unwilling to hide or stay stagnant. Together and separate. Ready to fight. Or wear down boulders. Ready to build a different better world on the ashes of this one with whatever is left when this toxic fire goes out.
with contributions from:
Badly Licked Bear
Nico D’Entremont
Arrousiak Gabrielian
Sadie Greyduck
MA Harms
Umi Hsu
Kiyomi Fukui
Luka Fisher
Leslie Foster
Eden Knutilla
Mathilda Lazelle
Ariel Oakley
Alystair Rogers
Salvador de la Torre
Dylan Ricards
Nina Sarnelle
Marco Schindelmann
Cassia Streb
“You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.”