Description: Oil film simulation of hydrocarbon compositions and behaviour from both the initial surface slick as well as deep subsurface plumes resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. HD video loop, colour with stereo sound, 6:27 mins. exhibited in conjunction with spoken-word audio, 33 mins, 2018

Nature Represents Itself was commissioned by SculptureCenter and is presented is presented in conjunction with Slick Images a body of image works that document the various media responders to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Abstract:

In the late evening of 20 April 2010, an explosion ripped through the British Petroleum (BP) leased Deepwater Horizon oilrig discharging a compressed stream of micro-image making particles into the coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico. As these chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms were released into the liquidity of the Gulf from their subterranean containment some four kilometres beneath the sea floor their natural photonic properties began to interact with the unstable and energetic surface molecules of the water, recombining to produce an iridescent image of horror. By the time the leaking exploratory well was finally capped on 15 July 2010 it had spewed an estimated 4.1 million barrels of crude into the Gulf, permanently damaging its marine biology, destroying coastal wildlife, polluting habitats and shutting down the fishing communities reliant upon the ecological bounty of the Gulf.
In the initial days of the disaster—before the drilling rig sank into the sea—its image regime was localised at the site of the blowout (although not necessarily the scene of the crime, which was distributed across corporate actors around the globe as the various investigative commissions would eventually expose) and dominated by spectacular shots of the burning rig engulfed by flames and bilious toxic smoke. The kind of dramatic images that demand our immediate attention and which Rob Nixon’s thesis of “slow violence” indicts as standing in the way of ecological justice. When the disastrous object disappeared from view into the murky depths below, its image-making capacities and modes of image-capture began to multiple various forms of technical media and distribution platforms.
While satellite transmissions and the underwater video feed, and even Public Lab’s activist mapping project all combined to document the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the slick was already operationalising an independent mode of cinema. Oil spills are literally slick images.

When the smooth viscosity of oil comes into contact with the rough surface tension of the sea—the point at which water molecules are exposed to air—rapid transformations in the thickness of the oil film occur and therefore also extraordinary and rapid shifts in colour. The cinematic capacity of the oil spill isn’t simply a consequence of its representational condition as a mirrored watery surface that is capable of projecting an aesthetic event back at us—abstracted and lurid patterns of reflected light—but is a feature of its very ontology—its molecular structure and behaviour. While analogous to the workings of the cinematic apparatus, the oil spill is perhaps better understood as engaged in the production of a new form of cinema organised by the found footage of ‘nature’ itself. One whose indexical operations are pushed to the extreme insofar as the external event to which it gestures—in the case of the Deepwater Horizon the release of an estimated 4.1 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf—is literally transformed into its very mode of image-production. The conditions that brought about the disaster are thus re-expressed as an ontological re-arrangement of molecular matter: a shift from the representation of the damaged drilling rig and its gushing crude to the actualisation of a ruinous image.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/24008