Field Notes for Future Petropractices: Refiguring Oil and/as Media

Abstract

The seemingly prosaic question "What is oil?" opens up a mystifying world of new conceptual frameworks, ethics, and material circumstances. What does it mean to think with oil beyond the practices of representation that enact its contemporary form? Between 2015 and 2018, my ongoing critical and creative oil research led to a series of crude oil media artworks, which illuminate, materialize, and reexamine basic assumptions of oil. Thinking with the diffractive methods of feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad, "Field Notes for Future Petropractices" addresses the artworks Oil Ontology (2017), Crude Illumination (2015), and Oil rituals for the future #6 (2018). Each of these uses the enigmatic product Crudoleum, 100% Pennsylvania Crude Oil Scalp Treatment, to enact the openended performativity of oil. My critical and creative practice, in which practices of making reciprocally determine and blur with practices of thinking, examines the early American oil industry and its entanglements with mysticism. This period matters because it is the commonly accepted historical origination of crude oil as a global energy commodity. As new energy regimes and new critiques of the Anthropocene emerge, it is crucial to continue examining how the ontological status of oil as a fossil fuel persists. Why is it taken for granted that oil-an earth material that exceeds anthropocentric categorization-is represented exclusively as fuel? The idea that beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes, anterior to their representation, is a metaphysical presupposition that underlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of representationalism. Or to put the point the other way around, representationalism is the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing. (Barad 2007, 46) Oil does something profoundly different than ideology. It restructures our relationships and capacities to perceive. Oil produces our daily lives, our daily selves, our daily communities Elia Vargas is an Oakland, California-based artist and scholar. He works across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance, focused on naturecultural media practices. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the co-founder and co-curator of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly salon on critical, intersectional perspectives of art and technology. He collaborates widely with artists, musicians, and institutions, and has worked at internationally acclaimed interactive design studios. As an educator and organizer, he is a steward for self-determination through critical and creative practice. His current work considers the cultural, philosophical, and techno-scientific conditions of the early American oil industry and argues for refiguring crude oil as media to decenter anthropocentric representations of natu...