Editorial Introduction | Oil and Media, Oil as Media: Mediating Petrocultures Then and Now

In this introduction to the special issue of MediaTropes on “Oil and Media, Oil as Media,” Jordan B. Kinder and Lucie Stepanik provide an account of the stakes and consequences of approaching oil as media as they situate it within the “material turn” of media studies and the broader project energy humanities. They argue that by critically approaching oil and its infrastructures as media, the contributions that comprise this issue puts forward one way to develop an account of oil that further refines the larger tasks and stakes implicit in the energy humanities. Together, these address the myriad ways in which oil mediates social, cultural, and ecological relations, on the one hand, and the ways in which it is mediated, on the other, while thinking through how such mediations might offer glimpses of a future beyond oil.

“Take A Good Look At It”: Seeing Postcolonial Medianatures with Karen Tei Yamashita

Plastic remains one of the most ubiquitous forms that oil takes as a mediating force in our everyday life. This article tracks the way in which this function of plastic has been obfuscated, particularly within the discursive space of academia, by way of a close reading of Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1990 novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. After contextualizing the author’s vision of a neoliberal media culture through a brief history of the recent disciplinary convergences of media studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism, I argue that Yamashita’s novel functions as a proleptic, literary articulation of the kinds of insights made possible by the combination of the three. Through its particular attention to the lifecycle of media—the transformation of plastic from raw material into technical object and then into trash—I argue that the novel offers a theory of plastic as media that usefully emphasizes its relation to the natural world as much as it does its connection to technology and culture.Image Credit: From the cover of Karen Tei Yamashita's book, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Coffee House Press (2017), https://coffeehousepress.org/products/through-the-arc-of-the-rain-forest.

“Our Stories about Extraction”: A Brief Interview with Elizabeth LaPensée

In this brief interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses Thunderbird Strike with Anishinaabe, Métis, and settler-Irish media theorist and artist Elizabeth LaPensée. Thunderbird Strike is a multiplatform, two-dimensional sidescrolling video game created by LaPensée in collaboration with Adrian Cheater and Aubrey Jane Scott (programming), NÀHGĄ a.k.a. Casey Koyczan (music and sound effects), and Kaitlin Rose Lenhard (cut scene editing). The conversation is centred on the inspiration for Thunderbird Strike, its reception, and its possibilities as a pedagogical medium.

Billboards and Petrocultures In West Texas

This article explores how fossil fuels are expressed on the surface of specific media: billboards. It is based on observations made during a “scholarly” road trip to West Texas aimed at studying the protests surrounding the construction of the Trans-Pecos Pipeline. Blending travel writing with a theoretical analysis of billboards, the article investigates the philosophy behind the Shale Revolution and examines the specific petroculture of the Permian Basin. Given their necessary conciseness, clarity and effectiveness, billboards contain both straightforward messages and profound subliminal cultural references. This makes them meaningful means to understand how oil and gas are embedded in the culture of Oil Country. It is argued that billboards related to fossil fuel extraction constitute nuanced forms of “petromedia” whose semantics and design reinforce a specific “philosophy of energy.” The petrocultural philosophy of West Texas is strongly anthropocentric and promotes ideas such as the instrumentality of nature, domination over untamed land, technoscientific power, drilling prowess, rugged individualism, and masculinity.

Imagine It Thick In Your Own Skin: Sculptures and a Unique Artist’s Book

In this artistic contribution, New York-based German artist Heide Hatry offers pictures of her sculpture series Imagine It Thick In Your Own Hair. According to Hatry, the project was intended to make people aware of the tragedy and motivate them to help clean up the disaster BP created in 2010 with the Deepwater Horizon spill. Hatry is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs, and cremated remains. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, death, the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst.

Beyond Doom and Gloom in Petroaesthetics: Facing Oil, Making Energy Matter

This essay argues that one of the factors holding back civilization-wide transitions to renewable energy is the widespread tendency to render petroleum and other hydrocarbons abject and abstract. Fossil fuel industry representations do this by hiding the true costs of petroculture behind the virtualization Energy; environmentalist framings do it by relying too much on petroaesthetics of doom (i.e., apocalyptic imagery) and gloom (i.e., Gothic visualizations of oil spills and rusting extractive infrastructure). The scarcity of representations of hydrocarbons that acknowledge both their life-giving and life-destroying properties, their powerful nonhuman agency in mediating practically every human and nonhuman relationship in the modern world, makes it hard to imagine alternatives to petroculture. Recently, artists have begun subverting petroaesthetic conventions in ways that counter the abstraction and abjection of hydrocarbons, including by using crude oil as an artistic medium in its own right. The oddly playful bitumen sands photographs of Louis Helbig, the bitumen-based “petrographs” of Warren Cariou, and the weird, enthralling “oilscapes” of Kathleen Thum are interpreted as meaningful challenges to the petroaesthetic status quo—provocations that matter in every sense of the word. Beyond merely promoting energy transitions, these images perform transitions as they empower viewers to see hydrocarbons as media with which all living things are deeply entangled.

Making “The Beast”: An Interview with Patrick McCurdy

In this interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet with Patrick McCurdy. The Beast is a 2018 graphic novel published by independent Canadian publisher Ad Astra Comix. It is the result of a collaboration between communications scholar Patrick McCurdy, writer Hugh Goldring, and artist Nicole Marie Burton. Emerging from McCurdy’s work on the MediaToil database project—a database that gathers together competing visual representations of the Athabasca Oil Sands from several stakeholders—the graphic novel addresses themes that arise from these representations while creatively exploring and navigating the tensions at the core of trying to live well in our current petroculture, a culture underwritten by neoliberalism and economic precarity.

Advertising an Empire of Oil: The British Petroleum Company and the Persian Khan Exhibit of 1924–1925

This article explores the publicity and advertising campaigns undertaken by the British Petroleum Company (BP) during the 1920s, focusing specifically on the Persian Khan exhibit mounted at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–1925. Despite their rich value as primary sources, the marketing campaigns of British oil companies—and in particular of BP—have been relatively overlooked by historians. Using an energy humanities approach, the article reconstructs the Khan exhibit and its galleries, revealing an imaginary world in which oil was framed as an exotic prize held captive beneath wild and inhospitable landscapes. As BP’s most elaborate and expensive advertising campaign of the 1920s, seen and visited by millions, the Persian Khan exhibit provides a valuable lens through which to view the broader development of British attitudes toward oil during the period.

Inscribing Interiority and Ideology: Representing the Visually Elusive in the American Petroleum Institute’s Cold War Films

Films sponsored by the American oil industry during the Cold War often pit communism and capitalism against each other, arguing for the latter’s ideological superiority. Since abstract ideologies are difficult to represent visually, the battle takes concrete form via depictions of layers of underground rock in films like The Last Ten Feet (1949) and Destination Earth (1956), which demonstrate how the American oil industry’s engineering ingenuity locates and extracts the precious crude oil reserves found therein. In this essay, I argue that by harnessing moving images’ power to visualize the optically elusive, films sponsored by the oil industry show it to have technological access to customarily inaccessible underground space, thus making the industry seem a more potent foil for the Red menace.Image Credit: Screenshot from Destination Earth (1956).