Slow Migrations of the North Sea

As fossil fuels gradually lose their purchase, industrially as much as financially, small grapplings with the interrelated challenges of changing economic structures, transportation infrastructures, the shifting natural world are everywhere emergent. What differentiates the Scottish communities of the North Sea where this research is conducted is that there the effects of oil’s quiet passing are both intensified and already pressing. Fieldwork is conducted in the rural communities of the Shetland Islands in their engagements with the sea and with oil and in the former oil boomtown of Aberdeen and its offshore assets. Care is taken to understand the interconnected well-being of sea creatures, offshore infrastructures, oil workers, and regular folks as each contends with changing environments that force movement upon even the most recalcitrant entities (from molluscs to Shell). My goal is to understand how this change is happening as a mode of investigating the pragmatics of a life no-longer premised upon oil as both adaptative and proactive responses come to characterize to the latter days of this long historical epoch.

The Global Mollusc

Molluscs and especially the edible bivalves — mussels, oysters, scallops and clams — serve to making a living and a meal, but they also catch at the imagination. Photographers snap them; painters too, paint and stitch them; environmental designers make bricks and reefs of, and for, them. Surprisingly often, they also come entangled with oil; both industries flourish in the same waters. And yet, molluscs attract an entirely different set of very particular (dare I say quirky) interested parties. Molluscs have fans! Artists, designers, fishers, cooks and other creative souls, plus scholars of every stripe and stipple — from cultural historians to paleoclimatologists – are drawn to these creatures, their ways of living, and our ways of living with them. To bring these curious minds together, I formed The Global Mollusc, an extraordinarily interdisciplinary endeavour. Together, members knit a world of curiosity through these small, tasty, flourishings and we invite conversation from any and all who are interested in taking part. Much more on The Global Mollusc can be found here.

Gas Stations as Ideographs, Berlin (and beyond)

During the corona virus pandemic, I began a project to map and photograph gas stations and fossil fueled power stations in Berlin once a decade to see what becomes of them —literally — as fossil fuel dominance in transport, power, and heating fades. Even as the map was finished and photography begun, the project bloomed in surprising ways. Gas stations in Berlin, and then, everywhere. Power Stations in Berlin, and then everywhere. The goal was to photograph 100 locations, to be revisited in 2030 and 2040 (and 2050, if I am still alive) creating a photographic archive of fossil fuel infrastructure drifting from dominance. Beyond the pragmatist's curiosity about how things change and what they become. I also move in these images towards experimentation with industrial beauty— the everyday ubiquity of our lives with industrial fuels and what they beget.

Minor Analytics

Many of the projects above take form first as a Minor Analytic. This essay project currently consists of 26 pieces of varying lengths each grounded in something small, average, unremarkable – sandwich, fridge, baby name, prefix, mussel – and, working up from this relatability, each attempts the alchemic. For alchemy was a poetics for the transubstantiation of substance, a collection of words and procedures that together were thought to affect a change in the substrate of the materials of the world. The essays are explorations of this. In each, the minor is the seed, or the small bone, through which something very large and very abstract is explored. The sandwich disparages the nation-state; the refrigerator stands athwart the energy transition (evens as it becomes sweet kin); prefixes make bad bedfellows with roots as pox of neologisms endlessly fail to capture what they are after; an estuary saves the day; a highway is exorcised. The commonsensical is here undone and then reconstructed of the same parts into something different, such that each minor thing becomes a tool in the manufacture of an experiment called analysis. At present the Minor Analytics exist as a buffet, an essay buffet. Fill your brain plate.

Lube: A Slippery History of Modern Life

Before the mass-extraction of petroleum became feasible and profitable in the mid-1800s, spermaceti —a buoyant waxy substance found in the monstrous head of the sperm whale – was the best, most thermally-stable, and least-frictive lubricant in the world. It is rumored even that it lubricated the pumps, looms, and engines of early industrialization, a process that was largely complete before the discovery of drilled oil in 1859. Once extractable, however, rock oil (petroleum) almost immediately overwhelmed all other lubricating materials, eliminating them both from machine works and also largely from the historical record. Indeed, histories of lubrication from antiquity to the present readily admit that we do not yet know what materials slid slippery through those early industrial gears.

Figuring this out would seem a simple historical problem with a simple answer. On the one side, spermaceti—“highly prized…and [the] most expensive lubricant of the day” (Dowson 1993: 263)—has whispered away. On the other side, some unspecified substance(s) slid between the joints of metal machine parts that demand lubrication to function. It is precisely in its elusive quality that the ‘missing link’ between these two stories has become something else. In today’s world characterized by an overabundance of information, a gap in knowledge is not simply an absence or a lack: it is indicative of a thing defying study. What has emerged as the most interesting element of this research is not the answers per se (though I do still seek them), but rather the ‘potentiality’ that marks a disappearance of narrative capacity at the moment spermaceti turns into a commodity and in places of softness and slipperiness inside hard, and fast mechanical systems. The persistence of these twin disappearances gives rise to a very different set of questions that center on how objects or persons carry a story and when they do not.

The Art of the Bar 🍸

I am a careful mixer of drinks. Ask my friends, they have suffered (with smiles) six, nine, twelve months in which I make the same drink again and again searching for the smallest shifts of ingredient or quantity, seeking alternative recipes, inventing this and that until I find it perfect only to begin the same process again with the next. This project is an on-going exploration of palate; it is fine homemade cocktails in bottles gifted but rarely (yet) sold; it is scheming and tasting; and it is the phantasm of a book, Cocktails We Love to Drink, an endlessly receding project; it remains forever but one year in the future.