Still from Deepwater Horizon, motion picture, USA 2016
Thinking about the roles images play in the production of knowledge around anthropogenic damage to ecosystems, one stumbles into a meshwork of contradictory relations. Principally, it is possible to distinguish between two different categories of images: those about situations of extraction/destruction (with images of disasters being the most popular) and those brought forward or made by the situations themselves. The latter is a relatively new (or newly recognized) type of images that Susan Schuppli refers to as ‘dirty pictures’, a way in which “anthropogenic environments are documenting their own damaged condition.”Both types of images share a problematic condition: as they formulate a critique of extraction, destruction, and pollution, they are also a part of or the result of the circumstances they depict. In the following text I will concentrate on image-making related to the extraction and uses of oil (and the products it is used to produce) as being probably the most important and momentous of all anthropogenic substances shaping the contemporary condition of the earth. I will track some of these contradictory constellations and try to elaborate an understanding of the dialectical yet calamitous dynamics associated with producing these images.
a visit to the Wiess Energy Hall at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS)
Downtown Houston from the innermost of the five highway belts. All images and videos in this post by alexclose.
Visiting the ‘Petro Metro’ on invitation by Popup Goethe’s director Grant Aymond, I get the chance to meet Daniel Minisini in person. He is a geologist working for Shell, and in his spare time he hosts an interview series at the local free radio station KPFT Houston directed mainly at the geologists and oil engineers working in Houston. [But via his Youtube Channel also to critical petromodernity researcher all over the world.] In the beginning of 2021 he had interviewed Benjamin and me via zoom.
When Daniel heard of my planned trip to Houston, he suggested a couple of places that I should definitely visit, among them the Wiess Energy Hall at the HMNS. The department, which has been completely remade for the bargain price of 42 Mio US$ and reopened in 2018, is dedicated to the physical aspects of a phenomenon that carries metaphysical proportions: energy, and its live-creating, live-sustaining powers.
In Houston, the world capital of oil, this comes down to a narrative almost thoroughly dedicated to the geological, technological, and—to some extent—social aspects of the exploration, production, refinement and consumption of petroleum.
The line-up of sponsors is a who-is-who of the oil business:
One can go down into the depths of the earth inside an enlarged, space capsule-like drillhead until striking oil. It feels like inside a shaky elevator with an overdimensional floor display:
Almost the same scenario is offered a second time, this time we travel horizontally over the land near Houston, than underneath it, in a spaceship-like fracking device:
Mentions of the problematic aspects of tough, unvonventional oil, about the damages done and the civil protests? None. The exhibition is a celebration of the achievements and perspectives of the “unconventional revolution” (as Daniel told me, the technologies of fracking and the like are referred to within the industry).
Oh, wait a second, here’s a critical passage dedicated to the possibility that it might be necessary in the future to step away from fossils towards other fuels:
Remarkable, though, that the striking argument is purely financial.
It’s not hard to find professional coverage of this feat on the internet, though, for instance here, on the Museum’s Website.
After a lunch presentation of our work with Beauty of Oil I gave the next day at the architecture faculty hall of Rice University, a distinguished professor and member of the RDA (Rice Design Alliance) asked me, what i would answer to the critique that we have just changed the pictures within but not the museum itself with our OIL-exhibition at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Given, that I had not seen a hint of a critical reflection of the oil legacy in all the impressing, shiny, and flashy museum landscape of Houston (with absolutely fantastic ensembles as the Cy Twombly Gallery in the Menil Collection and other top rate shows and collections dedicated mainly to classic modernity—meaning, the heydays of petromodernity), and also given, that I did get no answer whatsoever to my questions for an official critical discourse on petromodernity in the artworld or elsewhere from my academic audience at Rice, this fundamental critique seemed to be rather odd.
“A google street view of CF Industries reveals almost nothing about these institutions” (after Bertolt Brecht)
The paper discusses the CF-industries ammonia plant in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. The plant is framed as an exemplary site from which the Anthropocene can be observed and understood. In doing so, a proposal for a “chemical cultural theory” is set out, to allow us to understand such molecular planetary technologies and interpret their (geo)historical significance. As one of the largest fertilizer plants in the world in terms of its output, and one of the largest chemical plants along the “Petrochemical Corridor,” a cluster of chemical industries situated between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Donaldsonville typifies the relations between the nitrogen and hydrocarbon industries. Catalysis is here used both as a chemical concept and as a metaphor central to the proposed chemical cultural theory. As key to the Haber-Bosch process and refinery technologies in general, investigating the role of catalysis allows us to connect the history of the Petrochemical Corridor to that of German industrialism. This relation reveals how, from the late 19th century through to the World Wars, an ambivalent industrial co-operation between the US and Germany not only transformed local and planetary environments, it also contributed to the Anthropocene condition.
What might it feel like to live in New York City after fossil fuels?
One year later as planned and only with the help of an NIE (National Interest Exception) they are finally happening with Alexander Klose physically in New York City, and together with New York-based speculative designer Chris Woebken: three successive precognitioning sessions taking place on Oct 28/29/30 at tenfourteen. space for ideas, 1014 5th Avenue, New York, NY!
Collage by Adeline Chum, Jules Kleitman, Aditi Mangesh Shetye, 2021
The fossil energy regime of coal, oil and gas has to and will end eventually, coal rolling and the renewed celebration of excessive fossil fuel consumption having been merely petromelancholic rebound effects… This is the backdrop for our ongoing research project on the histories and afterlives of petromodernity. How do we want to live in a post-fossil future? How and with whom will we develop new kinships after the social bonds connected to the resource economy and the exuberant promises of our ‘Western Way of Life’ are untied? Will we actively delve into a world of living materials and microbiological entanglements? Will we get beyond racism and patriarchy? Will we cease to privately own land?
Join us at one of three successive precognitioning sessions at 1014! Play out visions of urban renewal, societal reformation, and a post-extractivist approach towards natures and societies after the possible endings of fossil energy regimes.
Collage by Tashania Akemah , 2021
Through narrative techniques and design futures methods a series of bespoke design interventions and immersive installations transform 1014 into a hyper-reality testing environment. Using guided speculative role play and co-created moments of immersion, participants are encouraged to experiment with new values and beliefs that might emerge in a post-petro world. The scenarios and installations have been developed in collaboration with an architecture course at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, led by participatory futures practitioner Chris Woebken in partnership with cultural researcher Alexander Klose.
The idea of precognition: Being neither driven by big corporations nor by governments, the precognition process takes up the project of working with and on futures in an explicitly non-technocratic, experimental way. It avoids statistics-based “scientific” methodologies. Instead, it relies on collectively crafted visions and material-based artifacts and embodied roleplay. An archeology of the fossil presence: surveying infrastructures, collecting images and narratives that at the same time manifest all kinds of afterlives and hint to possible escape routes.
You’re invited to join us as a participant on one of the evenings Oct 28, Oct 29, Oct 30. In two groups of max 15 people, visitors will walk through the installations and the precognitioning process accompanied byAlexander Kloseand Chris Woebken and different ‘lead speculators’ from varying fields of practice and knowledge for each evening. We will explore and respond to new precognitioned values, myths, and cultural imaginations that might emerge while being shaped by the afterlives of petro-modernity.
Thursday 10/28, 6:30 – 9 pm with lead speculators Dan Taeyoung and Dr. Elizabeth Hénaff
Friday 10/29, 6:30 – 9 pm with lead speculators Aristilde Kirby and Frank Morales
Saturday 10/30, 6:30 – 9 pm with lead speculators Ayodamola Okunseinde and Ben Holbrook
For more information on the lead speculators scroll down.
Precognitioning Post-Oil is realized in cooperation with GSAPP Columbia University
Dr. Elizabeth Hénaff is a computational biologist with an art practice. Her academic trajectory started with a Bachelors in Computer Science, followed by a Master’s in Plant Biology (both from UT Austin) and a PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Barcelona. At the center of her work is a fascination with the way living beings interact with their environment. This inquiry has produced a body of work that ranges from scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, to projects with landscape architects, to working as an artist in environments from SVA to the MIT Media Lab. She has made contributions to understanding how plants respond to the force of gravity, how genome structure changes in response to stress, and most recently has turned her attention to the ubiquitous and invisible microbial component of our environment. She currently holds an Assistant Professor position in the Technology, Culture and Society department at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in New York City.
Ben Holbrook is a Brooklyn-based (originally from NC) playwright and filmmaker whose works have been produced, developed, or commissioned by: Fundamental Theater Project, Ruddy Productions, The New York International Fringe Festival, The Memphis Fringe Festival, The Motor Company, Voices of the South (TN), Ugly Rhino(LA), Seoul Players (SK), Holiday House, Find the Light (LA), The Irish Arts Council, 45th Street Block Association, and Paper Lantern Theatre Company (NC). His films have been seen at the Big Apple Film Festival, The Imaginarium Convention, The Comedy of Horrors Festival, The Sickest Short Films Festival, and The Films Open Mic Festival. He’s been awarded the Edward Albee Foundation fellowship, the Drama League Rough Draft Residency (partnering with Sam Underwood), Fresh Ground Pepper’s Playground Playgroup Residency, The New Concepts Theatre Lab at UNC-Greensboro, Magic Time at Judson Church, and is the inaugural recipient of the Peter Shaffer Award for Excellence in Playwriting. Ben is also the co-owner of Full Metal Workshop.
Aristilde Kirby (she/they, b. 1991) is a poet, like the play of the ripples on the water. Daisy & Catherine², her latest chapbook, is out in November via Auric Press. Past works include Daisy & Catherine (Belladonna, 2017) & Sonnet Infinitesimal / Material Girl (Black Warrior Review & Best American Experimental Writing 2020). She has a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing from Bard College. You can just call her Aris, like Paris without the P.
Frank Morales
Episcopal Priest, Writer and Housing Activist
Frank Morales is a legendary New York City housing activist, a radical Episcopalian priest who has been squatting in the South Bronx and on the Lower East Side since 1978. Morales was the housing organizer for Picture the Homeless, a homeless-led grassroots group that developed a multipronged program of direct action to secure housing for homeless people, alongside groups like Miami’s Take Back the Land.
Morales currently co-leads Organizing for Occupation, a group of New York City residents from the activist, academic, religious, homeless, arts, and progressive legal communities who have come together to respond to the housing crisis. The group believes that safe and affordable housing is a human right and that, given the failure of government and the private sector to address the crisis, it is up to those who are most directly affected by it to secure that right through nonviolent direct action. The group intends to create housing through the occupation of vacant spaces and to protect people’s right to remain in existing housing through community-based anti-eviction campaigns.
Ayodamola Okunseinde
Nigerian-American Artist, Designer, Anthropologist and Time-traveler
Okunseinde studied Visual Arts and Philosophy at Rutgers University where he earned his B.A. His works range from painting and speculative design to physically interactive works, wearable technology, and explorations of “Reclamation”. He was nominated for the 2021 inaugural Knight Art + Tech Fellowship and is a 2021 fellow of the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought. His works exist between physical and digital spaces; across the past, present and future. Okunseinde’s works ask us, via a technological lens, to reimagine notions of race, identity, politics, and culture as we travel through time and space. He holds an M.F.A. in Design and Technology and an M.A. in Anthropology from The New School. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and serves as an Assistant Professor of Interaction and Media Design at Parsons School of Design.
Dan Taeyoung is a learner, facilitator, spatial designer, and technologist. His practice involves around collaborating to create architectural spaces and social collectives that embody how we might want to live together, as well as researching design and social tools that change the way we work together. He teaches at Columbia University GSAPP and NYU IDM; is a founding member of Soft Surplus, a co-founder of Prime Produce, a guild for social good, the NYC REIC, an real estate investment cooperative working towards anti-displacement and community land ownership.
Das Buch fungiert einerseits als Katalog, aber auch als bleibender Beitrag zur Petrokulturforschung mit weit mehr als den in der Ausstellung befindlichen Werken und Forschungsbeiträgen internationaler Expert*innen, deutsche und englische Ausgabe, je 400 Seiten, ca. 450 Abbildungen, Gestaltung Jan Kiesswetter, mit einem Vorwort von Andreas Beitin, einer Einleitung von Alexander Klose und Benjamin Steininger und Texten von Akintunde Akinleye, Leila Alieva, Dominic Boyer, Jan von Brevern, Heather Davis, Elena Engelbrechter, Christoph Engemann, Timothy Furstnau, Eckhart Gillen, Rüdiger Graf, Helmut Höge, Bernhard Hopfengärtner, Isabel J. Piniella Grillet, Karen Pinkus, Christian Schwarke, Suwarno Wisetrotomo und Susanne Witzgall), 39 EUR im Museumsshop und auf kunstmuseum.de
The book operates as a catalogue, but at the same time is meant to be a lasting contribution to petrocultural research with a lot more than the artistic works shown in the exhibition and essays by international experts, German and English edition, each 400 pages, approx. 450 illustrations, design by Jan Kiesswetter, with a foreword by Andreas Beitin, an introduction by Alexander Klose and Benjamin Steininger, and texts by Akintunde Akinleye, Leila Alieva, Dominic Boyer, Jan von Brevern, Heather Davis, Elena Engelbrechter, Christoph Engemann, Timothy Furstnau, Eckhart Gillen, Rüdiger Graf, Helmut Höge, Bernd Hopfengärtner, Isabel Piniella, Karen Pinkus, Christian Schwarke, Suwarno Wisetrotomo, and Susanne Witzgall, 39 EUR at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and at kunstmuseum.de.
We have been working on this project for more than five years. An exhibition about petromodernities around the world and how they have been reflected by artistic works. Its preparation at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg—in the lion’s den next to the headquarters of VW and indirectly financed by this world leading car manufacturing company—has been interrupted and delayed by severe incidents: the unforeseen replacement of the museum’s director, the restrictions of a pandemic….
But now it is really going to happen! The first retrospective of petromodern art. Opening Sat, Sept. 4th.
With: Monira Al Qadiri, Ana Alenso, Francis Alÿs, Yuri Ancarani, Qiu Anxiong, Atelier van Lieshout, Kader Attia, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Klaus Auderer, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck & Media Farzin, Lothar Baumgarten, Jennifer-Jane Bayliss, Wes Bell, Uwe Belz, Claus Bergen, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ursula Biemann, Vanessa Billy, Brett Bloom, Mark Boulos, Margaret Bourke-White, Bureau d’Etudes, Edward Burtynsky, Warren Cariou, Christo, Tony Cragg, Walter De Maria, Mark Dion, Gerardo Dottori, Sokari Douglas Camp, Rena Effendi, William Eggleston, Hans Fischerkoesen, Sylvie Fleury, John Gerrard, Christoph Girardet, Claus Goedicke, Tue Greenfort, Carl Grossberg, Monika Grzymala, Robert Gschwantner, Hans Haacke, Ernst Haeckel, Eberhard Havekost, Romuald Hazoumè, Armin Herrmann, John Heartfield, Michael Hirschbichler, Bernhard Hopfengärtner, Murad Ibragimbekov, Aaditi Joshi, Peter Keetman, Matt Kenyon, Tetsumi Kudo, Ernst Logar, Mark Lombardi, Ellen Karin Mæhlum, Rémy Markowitsch, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Paul Michaelis, Kay Michalak & Sven Völker, Richard Misrach, Michael Najjar, Hugo Niebeling, Franz Nolde, Kate Orff, George Osodi, Alex Prager, Alain Resnais, Oliver Ressler, Martha Rosler, Miguel Rothschild, Ed Ruscha, Shirin Sabahi, Santiago Sierra, Taryn Simon, Andreas Slominski, Robert Smithson, Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger, Thomas Struth, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gunhild Vatn, Wolf Vostell, Entang Wiharso, Erwin Wurm, Yuts
Find here the german exhibition folder, downloadable as pdf. An english description of the exhibition can be accessed through the link on the bottom of the page.
Online conversation on imaginary futures, how to conceive of, get there and avoid them
with Heather Davis, Elizabeth Hénaff, Timothy Furstnau, and Karen Pinkus. Conceived of and moderated by Alexander Klose and Chris Woebken. Hosted by 1014. With works by students of CUNY Citytech.
Thursday, Dec 3, 2020, 6-7:30 pm EST on Zoom.
A videorecording of the complete zoom talk can be seen on the bottom of this page.
Imagine, oil-eating microbionts had taken over, cleaning up our current environmental mess. But they had also done away with everything beautiful and essential made out of plastics.
Imagine, the use of fossil fuels and all fossil-fuelled technology had been forbidden without a proper energetic substitute. Everything eventually had to be driven down. Less mobility, less luxury, no exuberance. Deserted petromodern infrastructures refueled with petronostalgia.
Imagine the American Way of Life reloaded, a return of cheap oil due to some scientific and technical breakthroughs. More consumption, more mobility, more wars, more of everything. Utopia or nightmare?
The 1014 project space has been transformed into a hyper-reality testing environment. It is populated with experiential futures prototypes that investigate our relationships in a spectrum of post-oil scenarios. Through narrative techniques and design futures methods a design studio at CUNY Citytech led by participatory futures practitioner Chris Woebken and cultural researcher Alexander Klose has developed a series of bespoke design interventions and immersive installations throughout our upper east side townhouse project space. In a private walkthrough Heather Davis (Eugene Lang College, The New School), Elizabeth Hénaff (NYU IDM), Timothy Furstnau (Museum Of Capitalism) and Karen Pinkus (Cornell University, Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Ithaca) were invited to immerse themselves into these alternative imaginations that explore new values and imaginaries for a post-petro New York City. Please join us for an online talk with our guests to delve into these precarious scenarios, and discuss and respond to new values, myths, and cultural imaginations that might emerge while being shaped by the afterlives of petro-modernity.
For more information on 1014 project space visit 1014.nyc
Initially planned as a three part series of experimental workshops in a multimedia setting at project space 1014, this is the digital Corona-version and precursor of the physical events that will hopefully take place in 2021.
As an exercise in speculative design futures, students of an advanced studio in the Emerging Media Technology program of CUNY Citytech in the fall semester of 2020 were assigned to teamwork on the development of their own speculative media environments based on one of four scenarios handed out to them and located in one of four environments (or ‘zones’):
The Meadowlands: New Jersey, attaching East River and crossed by Hackensack River, the industrial hinterland and backwater of NYC;
Newtown Creek: a very heavily polluted canal on the boarder between Brooklyn and Queens, site of a continuous flow of oil spills that had been going on for 140 years and were altogether at least 50% bigger than the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill ;
Gowanus Canal: an industrial canal called by the name the indigenous inhabitants of this part of Brooklyn before the city gave its predeceasing natural waterstream, according to EPA (Unites States Environmental Protection Agency) one of the nation’s most seriously contaminated water bodies, now surrounded by heavily gentrifying areas;
Manhattan: the island that has been the zone per se in so many ficticious renderings of (post-)hyperurban life.
Wie in einem System kommunizierender Röhren sind tatsächlich alle Gesellschaften auf ihre Weise betroffen, Rohstoffökonomien wie Kanada, die Golfstaaten oder Russland, aber auch In-dustrie- und Raffinerieökonomien in Europa und Asien, Produzenten und Konsumenten. Und man wird Wissen aus allen Strängen und Ecken dieses Systems benötigen, um das nächste, dann nachhaltige System zu entwickeln
Energy Humanities EAST, a congress organized by slawistic and literary scholars from Humboldt University Berlin and University Potsdam, in cooperation with the University of Chicago, reacted to the fact that the academic field Energy Humanities, i.e. the cultural research of fossil modernities has been dominated by US-American and Canadian researchers and their respective research fields, namely their home cultures. The prominent role that namely the US has been playing in pathing the way into petromodernity can hardly be denied. But given, that the world had been strictly divided into two competing spheres of political-economic systems during the longest phases of the petromodern 20th century, it also seems quite reductionist to assume that the “American Way of Life” was the incarnation of the petromodern lifestyle and therefore researching on it would mean to trace aspects of this lifestyle in cultures around the globe. Quite the opposite could be true, that the sowjet system and society has produced its very own version of petromodernity and energy culture. To start collecting the pieces of this new perspective on the legacy of the sowjet-russian empire was the aim of the congress.
Beauty of Oil was invited to produce and show a REVUE PETRO NOIR at Kino Arsenal as the opening event. We concentrated on the Sowjet-Russian and Easter-European holdings in our media archive and on a materialistic reading of Malewitch’s Black Square and the futuristic opera Victory over the Sun, in which it had materialized for the first time. Since we were not showing the material as a multi-channel projection but from one projector in a cinema, and in order to avoid being misinterpreted as some kind of cinematic contribution, we decided on the square format for the projection.
