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Elegies of Oil Spills
aleesteele.mmm.page/elegies-for-oil-spills
Our project asks a central question: how do we counter the embodied ethos of extraction? How might we assemble existing techniques to help us perceive and resist the physical and emotional effects of extractive systems?
Extraction’s contradictions surround us: in the commodities that structure our lives, in the unwaged labor that sustains volunteer communities, and in the natural resources demanded by computational work, especially data-hungry AI. These tensions shape both our world and our inner lives, yet they are rarely understood as embodied experiences, even when scholars and journalists map them intellectually.
In response, we created Elegies for Oil Spills, an artwork that asks:
- Can a machine mourn for the climate?
- If an oil spill could speak, what would it say?
- What might machine mimicry reveal about narratives of oil, spillage, and ecological destruction?
Using open datasets of major oil spills, the system generates speculative artefacts printed as thermal-paper receipts. The receipt becomes a generative canvas, its production process echoing oil refinement.
A viewer begins by selecting an oil spill on a map. The system then searches for articles related to the spill’s metadata, probing available resources to ‘extract’. These articles are scraped and passed through a refinement pipeline: first to the ChatGPT API to produce an elegy, then again to generate a minimalist brutalist image derived from the poem. The final output is issued as a unique, single-use generative artwork.
All components are contained within a black box housing a touchscreen, Raspberry Pi, and Epson receipt printer. The installation can sit on a plinth or be wall-mounted. While designed for full functionality with Wi-Fi, it also includes an offline mode with local data.