The Oil Show
12 November 2011–19 February 2012
Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) at Dortmunder U
Dortmund, Germany
With works by:
Ursula Biemann (CH)
Christian von Borries (DE)
Mark Boulos (US/NL)
Heath Bunting (UK)
Bureau d’Etudes (FR)
The Center for Land Use Interpretation (US)
Chto Delat? (RU)
Carl Michael von Hausswolff &
Thomas Nordanstad (SE)
Werner Herzog (DE)
Mark Lombardi (US)
Michael Mandiberg (US)
George Osodi (NG)
Natascha Sadr Haghighian (IR/DE)
UBERMORGEN.COM (AT/CH)
and others

Curated by: Dr. Inke Arns
Download catalog here

In The Oil Show the HMKV has gathered 15 contemporary artists whose work addresses the geopolitical, social and ecological consequences of our dependence on crude oil. Their attention focuses on regions such as the Niger Delta, whose natural resources have been ruthlessly exploited for several decades—a fact which is hardly ever discussed publicly in the developed countries. Straddling art and scientific research, the interdisciplinary approach that characterizes their work aims to raise the public’s awareness of the increasingly complexity of global economic interests.

The installations, videos, photographs, murals, computer games and films in this exhibition evidence that Western societies are going to great lengths to conceal the inconvenient facts on which their centuries-old hegemony is founded, aiming to strengthen our complacent belief in an unrestricted, consumer-driven market economy—fuelled by non renewable fossil resources—as an everlasting, self-stabilizing model of growth. But appearances are deceptive, as recent research suggests that the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction, which scientists refer to as ‘Peak Oil’, was reached around 2006. Despite the conspicuous optimism put on by the PR departments of billion-dollar global oil companies in light of promising oil reserves (for instance in the Arctic), it is an undisputed fact that the global community urgently needs to address the growing problems caused by rising demands for energy and natural resources on the one hand and the decline of available fossil resources on the other hand. With great artistic sensibility, the works in The Oil Show ask questions which are largely shunned by the dominant Western media.

The New York Times covers the New Amsterdam Bike Slam. We won hardcore. We proposed angle in parking, charging for street parking (!), bike ferries, multimodal transport, passive visibility through retroreflective coatings, secure centralized bike storage, a bike school bus (where a leader comes by and picks up all the kids on bikes and bikes to school in a posse), but best of all, we proposed a bike freeway:

But Team Amsterdam had more tricks up its sleeves. How about bicycle freeways? asked Carmen Trudell, a New York architect and City University professor. Imagine a bicycle speedway running under the shadow of Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, a rain-free place for athletic cyclists out on training rides or those who just are not going to go at a “Dutch pace.”

Our presentation was awesome, and we are going to work on turning it into a paper or video in the next month or so. Too many good ideas. Too many good collaborators. Shout outs to great collaborators Claire Weisz, Carmen Trudell, Shachi Pandey, Wendy Schipper, and Stefan Verduin.

I can’t wait for my dutch bike!

More from our presentation:

Direct access to the FDR Bikeway from the Manhattan Bridge

New York City has the most expensive parking lot parking, and the cheapest street parking: free!

Think about those 150 sq feet of pavement transported to underneath an appartment building. If the building is four stories high:that is two studio apartments we’re talking about. That’s $3000-$5000 per month! And the city gives it away for free.

We need to take it back for the 99% of city dwellers who don’t park a car on city streets, with angle in parking, a bike lane on every street far away from doors (my assistant was doored today even!), a special spot for short truck deliveries, and a spot at the end of each block for 10 minute parking so people don’t just leave their cars in the middle of the street to pick up take out or dry cleaning.

And of course, bike parking at the end of each block

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Concept by BrightNYC team from the New Amsterdam Bike Slam (Michael Mandiberg, Shachi Pandey, Wendy Schipper, Carmen Trudell, Stefan Verduin, and Claire Weisz). All renderings by Carmen Trudell.

Watch the whole thing. Or at least the first 12 minutes. Its worth it. Fascinating. It is so familiar that I feel like I was shown this in grade school… alongside Powers of Ten.

Some things have changed since Ulrich Franzen made it: waterfronts are now viewed as more precious potential parks than he views the street. Putting a two mile long building on any waterfront would not work these days. Also, his vision of shared cars is starting to come true, with shared rentable cars now available in most cities, and bicycle share programs across Europe and heading stateside. I wondered if today’s political and economic culture could handle he importance and respond to the difficulty of such massive change; a review of Boston’s tragically executed and financially draining Big Dig would be a good case study in what can go wrong. All that said, I felt there were two things missing: Subways and Bicycles.

He never addresses subways: do we keep them, do we make more, are they better or worse than busses (electric or otherwise)? Which really is a question of fixed route transportation: you can put a bus in anywhere you want when you need it, but you can’t just add or take away a subway. There are vast swaths of Brooklyn and Queens that are underserved by Subways because in the first half of the 20th Century, either no one lived there because they were factories and are now living lofts, or (I would guess) the people that lived their lacked the political or economic power to bring the subway closer to them.

The other absence is any discussion of the bicycle. And while the bicycle is not the cure-all, for every transportation woe, having spent time in cities like Amsterdam, Portland, and even Shanghai & Beijing, it is clearly a hugely important part of removing strain on existing private and public infrastructure.

Just for comparison look at Shenzhen. Located just north of China’s border with Hong Kong, Shenzhen was designated China’s first Special Economic Zone roughly 30 years ago. At the time, it was rice patties. Now it is a city with the same population as New York City. It is the location one of the countries two stock exchanges, has remarkable skyscrapers, but has almost no urban planning to speak of. Much of the development has been dictated by the swaths of land set aside for corporate factories made possible by huge foreign investment. A subway was opened sometime in the last ten years, and it is in the process of being expanded. But it is one line. Running east to west. And only covers a small percentage of the width of the city. Running above this subway from the water to the city center is the main thoroughfare. When I visited we drove in my host’s car through this mostly-stoplight-free congested two lane road at a mere 25 MPH; all because of congestion, a disproportionate number of accidents by new drivers, and a lack of any other east west transportation mode. In Shenzhen new wealth lead to massive purchase of cars by first time drivers as a proud sign of their rise into economic power. At the time I was there, Shenzheners were purchasing 200,000 new cars per year. All this in a city of roughly 10 million. It corresponds with a Los Angeles like breakdown of the transportation system.

Inversely, the much much older Shanghai and Beijing have established subway systems, and a long standing bicycle culture. Despite being much larger cities traffic moves much faster, even though more people moving from one place to another. The citizens of Shenzhen do not commute far, as much of Shenzhen is made up of large and small factories that usually contain their own workers housing, which ranges from formal dormitory style high rises, to informal ramshackle wooden bunk beds in unlit rooms divided by curtains.

All this always interests me, but I am especially interested in these questions right now, as I am about to participate in the New Amsterdam Bike Slam a Transportation Alternatives co-sponsored bike related three think-tank as poetry-slam. I’ll be on one team, and some of the participants are listed here.

And while the focus of this session is on bikes in the harbor area (something dear to my heart as I commute to teach at the College of Staten Island/CUNY by bike and ferry), seeing (or maybe re-seeing) Franzen’s film has spurred my thinking in a different direction.

(via Urban Omnibus)

My environmental focused plugins are included in the exhibition End of Oil at Exit Art. The opening is this Saturday, June 13th from 6-8. The exhibition runs from June 13 – July 31, 2009.

A project of SEA (Social-Environmental Aesthetics) , The End of Oil is an exhibition of photography, prints, videos, installations and new media that addresses human dependence on oil and other fossil fuels; the ramifications that this dependency has on the future of the environment and of global geopolitics; and the recent push towards viable alternative energy resources.

FEATURING PROJECTS BY:

Khalil Chishtee; Louisa Conrad; Robert Ladislas Derr; Dominic Gagnon; Ed Kashi; Matt Kenyon; Michael Mandiberg; Andrei Molodkin; Jo Syz

How many website hits to date for Real Costs?

How many downloads of the software (.xpi)?

To be honest I hate counting hits and downloads. It inevitably reminds me of popularity contests and other things that are obsessive and psychologically dangerous.

That said i do think that these things are somewhat useful. In particular I am interested in tracking the number of times it has been bookmarked on delicious, though I think that my digg score is almost irrelevant because of the pure geekery that takes place on digg. I am a geek but my work is often too theoretical. I have been trying to make my new work more diggable so-to-speak.

If you know, how “global” is Real Costs? IE, do you know how many “countries” are represented in the panoply of hits you get on the site?

Again, I’m not so focused on hits, but I can say that the airplane sites that the script works on are truly global. Delta, Air France, El Al.

Or at least those were some of the sites that it worked on most recently. It is a constant struggle to keep my code current with the code of all of those airplane websites. Everytime they change their HTML/CSS I have to correct my code to reflect this

The scientist you worked with (P. Timon McPhearson Ph.D.), what was his role in the project?

Timon made sure my science was ad accurate as itcould be. He guided me to key information resources like WRi. And he researched detailed information on the amount of carbon a tree really offsets one of his colleagues who is a carbon sequestratuon researcher.

Where are you with the next version? Are other projects pressing, or are you still pretty committed to this project? Just curious, not going to write about this…..

I made a google mashup that calculates the cost of travel on dollars and carbon based on the car and the price of gas. I have been waiting to launch it.

Howmuchitcosts.us

Any other worthy factoids?

While air travel accounts for 2% of world carbon production, recent estimates put worldwide computer use at an equal 2%

Click the image for full res version

The Green Marketing page on Wikipedia. Objectively chronicling the pursuit of the various marketing associations to make a greenback of the green movement(s).

Into this page on Green Marketing, some wikipedian has inserted images of Green Markets. AKA Farmers Markets. A wonderful, willful misunderstanding of a pun.

I first noticed this a year ago, and the images are still up there. How wonderful.

Oz Etzioni‘s Unrecyclable logo won the Eco-Vis Design Challenge last (last?) year. He recently made the image available under a Creative Commons license.

We made a couple hundred of these for the exhibition, and they were gone on the first day. Now you can make your own. if someone gets some printed, send me some c/o Eyebeam!