Core Sample (2007) is a GPS-based interactive sound walk and corresponding sound sculpture that evokes the material and cultural histories contained in and suggested by the landscape of Spectacle Island. The piece engages the extended landscape of Boston Harbor as bound by the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art building on the downtown waterfront, and Spectacle Island, a former dump and reclaimed landfill park visible just off the coast. The two sites function dialogically, questioning what is seen versus what is not seen, what is preserved and recorded versus what is suppressed and denied.

Spectacle Island was recently transformed into a publicly accessible landfill park after serving the city of Boston as a dump for nearly a century. The island has long been used for recreation, recycling and waste disposal, having been home to horse rendering and grease extraction plants, casinos, hotels and families who worked in these industries. 20th century waste and recycling industries eventually reduced the island to a toxic state such that it was closed in the late 1950s. Recently capped with tons of excavation material from Boston's Big Dig Tunnel Project, the island is now a public landfill park that includes over 28,000 plantings embedded in a top layer of scientifically formulated loam.

Core Sample seeks to pierce the picturesque surface that conceals Spectacle Island's complex past, present and future, exposing it through layers of sound. Visitors to the island borrow small computer / headphone units equipped with GPS and wander the island to hear sounds inspired by the island's complex material and cultural history. Sounds play back automatically as the GPS senses the visitor's movement in the landscape. Over 250 sounds are spatially and thematically organized according to elevation, evoking a metaphoric core sample that extends from the earth's core to the cosmos. Open cell headphones allow blurring to occur between actual and pre-recorded ambient sound. Abstract sounds, field recordings, satellite radio samples, and musical compositions are sparsely punctuated with occasional passages of spoken word, dissolving boundaries between surface and core, natural and artificial, industrial and organic, past, present and future. Spoken word passages include interviews with current and former island residents and laborers, landfill technology experts (Niall Kirkwood), and botanists who study disturbed landscapes and ecosystems (Peter del Tredici).

Visitors to the museum encounter a ninety-nine foot sound sculpture that first appears as a railing running the length of the gallery that overlooks the harbor. The sculpture, embedded with tactile drivers, functions as a giant speaker. Sounds from the island installation quietly emanate from within the form at spatial intervals corresponding to the "depths" of the metaphoric core sample. The sculpture invites the absent-minded touch of viewers as they lean on the railing to take in the view. The soundscape is subtle, cycling through thematic sequences such that it may even be mistaken for ambient outdoor sound permeating the glass façade.