Since the late 1980s
Dan Peterman has intervened into the systems through which ideas and materials circulate in contemporary consumer culture. He often uses postconsumer reprocessed plastic or retooled found materials in his sculptures and installations.

For Beyond Green, Peterman has "recycled" an existing installation entitled Excerpts from the Universal Lab (plan b). This work originated as a site-specific commission for the Smart Museum's 2000 exhibition Ecologies: Mark Dion, Peter Fend, Dan Peterman and has since been reconfigured into new projects for other exhibitions. All of these versions of the project use objects from an actual place, a now-defunct scientific laboratory formerly housed in a warehouse on the south side of Chicago. At the Universal Lab, a group of amateur scientific researchers gathered discarded items that they had scavenged from the University of Chicago's laboratories and loading docks and used these materials for their own research. Eventually the space became clogged, the operation closed its doors, and in 2000 its contents were almost discarded by the building's new owners. Peterman and others intervened and helped save and reuse many of these materials, some of which returned to the University of Chicago as artwork, went through the inventory process, and took on a new life as sculpture.

In this latest iteration of the Universal Lab, created for Beyond Green, Peterman has sorted some of this detritus into new, much smaller groupings contained within a series of elegant, rolling vitrines that evoke laboratory carts, globe stands, museum display cases, and sci-fi machines. The mobility of these carts echoes the nomadic nature of the objects they contain, which have accrued new layers of meaning and value as they have traveled from an initial functional life through several cycles of use and reuse. In addition to reusing materials, this project calls into question the art world's persistent demand for new work and the consumption of resources that this production requires.