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

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 open-ended 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?