CONDUCTING MOBILITY

An online exhibition about energy & transportation curated by Claude Willey and Ryan Griffis.

ESSAYARTISTS WORKS

The issues of transportation and energy are delicately intertwined. Urban lifestyles, both in the developing and developed world are demanding greater mobility, and with it an insatiable demand for energy and resources. While the problems associated with transportation are visible – traffic congestion, outward metropolitan growth (i.e. sprawl), mass transit inflexibility, etc.- energy production is an abstract, often distant activity. As we move about our lives, we rarely think about where the fuels come from that propel our automobiles and power our homes.

Cheap and abundant energy in the twentieth century stimulated the low-density development patterns of our modern age. Oil and natural gas supplies were discovered around the world at break-neck speed and we entered an era where the car became the ultimate symbol of freedom. While movement remained a cherished ability of the privileged, others soon became forcibly mobile or violently constrained. Natural disasters, military conflict, perceived economic opportunities, and environmental catastrophes pushed people across state and country lines, even across oceans. Globalization created a world of massive planetary flows as capital, labor, and raw materials began moving around the world at a previously unimaginable pace. The urge to move may have always been with us, but the costs attached to those desires have increasingly become apparent.

Petroleum: the seemingly magical substance that makes everyday life in the developed world possible. It is easily transported, stored and extremely versatile. Our food production systems, for example, require extensive use of petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides (not to mention machinery and packaging). Oil has become the prime ingredient in the agribusiness formula. We are, according to author James Howard Kunstler, ‘eating oil.’

The connection between energy and nutrition can be bridged by the concept of food miles – a measurement of the distance food must travel from farm to fork. The international art collective Free Soil, created a multi-media investigation of urban farming and food distribution titled F.R.U.I.T. which addresses these issues. Through online documentation of research, interactive dialogue and distributed produce wrappers, F.R.U.I.T. challenges us to expand our understanding of food beyond the supermarket shelves and demands that we have a ‘right to know’ how our food interacts with the world.

It took thousands of years to move from human muscle-power to draft animals to simple machines drawing renewable energy from wind and water sources. ‘Over the past 150 years,’ according to environmental analyst Lester Brown, ‘cities have become increasingly reliant on dirty and distant energy sources, leaving them vulnerable to supply disruptions and destroying community-based notions of environmental protection.’ Energy researchers looking at our fossil fuel energy predicament note that our energy future may look much different from the centralized power-grid systems of today. Many have pointed to small-scale, locally installed power equipment known as ‘distributed generation’ or ‘decentralized power production.’ In these energy production scenarios, small towns and entire cities would be responsible for their energy needs, much of it coming from varied sources like solar, wind, or hydroelectric. The expensive transmission and distribution infrastructure associated with large power grids could be minimized or even eliminated depending upon the scale of production.

This notion of localized production is the premise of Chicago-based artist Laurie Palmer’s Notions of Expenditure. Conceived as a open-ended proposition, Notions solicits renderings of exercise equipment and gyms redesigned for the purpose of producing electricity. Responses from artists and other anonymous contributors, ranging from attempts at the functional to the critically ironic, have been reproduced and distributed as advertisements throughout Chicago’s mass transit system.

On one hand, these proposals read as idealistic attempts at functionality. The proliferation of consumer gyms could be put to better use than merely keeping us toned and trim. On the other hand, an appropriation of ‘people power’ to supply ‘power to the people’ subtly exploits the individualism and pragmatism of industrial culture. We work out, not to benefit others, but to compete in a world ruled by the ‘fittest.’ Palmer’s suggestion to connect our bodies directly to the production of electricity might engender visions of exploitation, as in The Matrix, but it also allows our capitalized bodies to become socially productive instead of disconnected batteries.

Since its tentative start in the late 1850s, the fossil fuel extraction game has increasingly become a grab for the earth’s declining supply of precious black gold. Sudden oil from wealth has destroyed ecosystems and decimated traditional ways of life in countries like Nigeria and Ecuador. China fuels its staggering economic growth by scouring the world in search of new energy supplies, such as the offshore Nigerian oil field its state-owned energy company bought into in 2006. ExxonMobil’s relationship with the country of Chad is another case in point. Although Chad’s government received $420 million in extraction fees, little of that money has filtered down to the country’s poor, and instead has ‘disappeared into bureaucrat’s bank accounts,’ writes Los Angeles Times writer, Edmund Sanders.

‘Under the likely terms of the contracts, oil company rates of return from investing in Iraq,’ for example, ‘would range from 42% to 162%, far in excess of usual industry minimum target of around 12% return on investment.’ This is one of the findings in a report titled Crude Designs: The Rip Off Of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, issued late in 2005, by the UK-based collective of artist-researchers known as PLATFORM. They have been using creative and interdisciplinary means to engage critical, global issues for over 20 years. One of their ongoing investigations, Unraveling the Carbon Web, source of the Crude Designs report, has as its mission to ‘reduce the environmental and social impacts of oil corporations’ through the production of educational documents, tours and arguments for changing policy. Unraveling the Carbon Web examines four oil-producing hot spots – Nigeria, Iraq, Russia and the Caucasus – offering a multi-pronged incursion into the life story of the global oil industry in order to understand how we might write a new, more equitable narrative.

The petroleum story, as we’ve seen, is about more than just fuel. It is a primary component of micro-fiber clothing, rubber for tires, asphalt, soaps, detergents, solvents, drugs, explosives, paints, epoxy resins, flooring, insulating materials and plastics – the fifth most energy-intensive of U.S. manufacturing industries. Petrochemicals are ubiquitous in our modern world and we are, to quote George W. Bush, ‘addicted to oil.’ We may be facing a painful withdrawal as we face what many petroleum geologists, like Colin Campbell and Jean Leherrere, refer to as the world oil production peak. According to this contentious theory, global oil production will eventually plateau before it enters into an arc of decline and ‘depletion of the world’s remaining reserves offsets ever-increased drilling.’

As the US dollar sinks faster than a breached oil tanker, its historic connection to petroleum production is becoming more tenuous by the day as OPEC nations debate the potential of other currencies. It has long been known that the era of the “gold standard” has been replaced by oil. This realization is the conceit of Michael Mandiberg’s Oil Standard, a web-based artwork that asks us to consider our buying habits in terms of oil rather than money. The work is a ‘plug-in’ for the Firefox web browser that one can install to translate prices listed in US dollars into equivalent values in barrels of oil- now approaching US$100 per barrel at the current moment of writing. Of course, this doesn’t tell us how much energy is used to manufacture and ship that new iPod from Amazon.com. That’s the job of Mandiberg’s newest plug-in project, Real Costs.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a report in 2006 called Emergency Evacuation Report Card 2006: 25 Urban Areas Could Face Greater Challenges than New Orleans Experienced After Hurricane Katrina. It evaluated 37 urban centers in the U.S. with special attention paid to traffic flow, highway capacity and automobile accessibility. As expected, the areas with the lowest population densities received the higher grades since they had easier evacuation routes and fewer barriers to the flow of traffic. With automobiles dominating the transportation picture in the U.S., it hardly comes as a surprise that the report concludes with a blanket prescription for America’s cities: the expansion of the nation’s roads and highways.

Unfortunately, automobile evacuation is limited, especially for the transit dependent and urban poor throughout the world. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, it claimed 1,200 lives, forcing a half million to become refugees. Another extreme evacuation situation was seen in the recent escape of the entire population of Labado, in Darfur, Western Sudan. When Labado was under attack, most of the residents fled on foot. To most Americans, abandoning a city with only the clothes on your back is a far-fetched impossibility. As highway systems prove unreliable for swift evacuation during times of crisis, the human foot may yet prove itself as the most trustworthy tool for getting out.

Channeling this intersection of emergency ‘management,’ transportation and militarization, Boston-based artist kanarinka has mapped her city’s evacuation routes in breaths in a project titled It takes 154,000 Breaths to Evacuate Boston. Running the official routes, established in 2006, kanarinka measured the number of breaths it took to flee the city on foot. Presented as archived sound recordings and maps with data about the route and the artist’s movement, 154,000 Breaths abstractly recalls images of New Yorkers walking out of the city in the heat of the 2003 blackout and the debris clouds of the collapsed Trade Center in 2001. When faced with social disasters, civilians become competitive runners on an uneven course constructed by global capital.

While evacuation is expected during environmental crises and military conflict, there are those who suffer daily from the ongoing and often invisible burdens of pollution and hazardous wastes near their homes. Sites like Cancer Alley, an area along the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has noted the release of tons of toxic chemicals into the soil, air, and water from some 300 industries, are the result of uneven development patterns and the inequitable distribution of industrial civilization’s externalized costs. ‘The evidence is strong,’ says Joseph R. Des Jardins, Academic Dean for St. John’s University, ‘if you are a person of color, you are much more likely to live in an area where toxic dumps, landfills, and polluting industries are or will be located.’

How does one make visible the often hidden, yet very real, presence of environmental injustice and racism? One solution taken by many communities and activists has been to publicly and visibly mark sites through the use of ‘toxic tours’ that bring people to contaminated locations. One example of such a tour is an audio guide of the I-5 Interstate Highway in California titled Invisible 5, produced through a collaboration between artists Kim Stringfellow, Amy Balkin, Tim Halbur, Pond and the activist organization Greenaction. Invisible 5 invites drivers to learn about the impacts of military and agricultural industries on the land and residents along this major transportation corridor. Interviews with the workers, residents, activists and scientists along the way provide a narrative of the ecological inequities surrounding drivers as they zoom past.

The interstate highway system in the United States can be perceived as one large self-contained environment, with little intended relationship with the built or natural world around it. Conceived back in the 1950s, highways were designed as territory for high-speed mobility. Created to support an industrial economy, interstate highways plowed through poor inner-city neighborhoods and bisected rural farms. Over time, the interstate system was seen not as a destructive juggernaut, but as a space of pure flow, a non-space unsuited to flora, fauna, or pedestrians.

Coming in somewhere between John Muir’s thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico in the 19th Century, and the Italian artist group, Stalker’s ‘trans-urban’ excursions into the forgotten spaces of cities and their hinterlands, artist Brian Collier has taken to the forbidden zones along US interstate highways to get a sense of the non-human life forms existing and thriving in these liminal spaces. Collier’s wanderings in and around the state of Illinois’ I-74 highway are undertaken not to reinforce the separation between the natural and high-speed worlds, but to uncover adaptations, changes, and surprises inaccessible at freeway speeds.

In an age of liberalized global markets, marginalization and forced migration are quickly becoming commonplace. Rural communities are collapsing due to shifts in the global economy that make small-scale agricultural production almost impossible. The new system of trade is evident in the actions of developed industrial nations that ‘rapidly suck out forest, mineral, and metal resources from the Third World’ in order to ‘externalize the costs’ of making consumer goods. Economic refugees flock to the megacities of the world – urban centers with populations over ten million – and cultivate their own dependence on products and food from far away.

As people move, voluntarily or forcibly, they strive to stay connected to those they leave behind. The ubiquity of mobile telephony and transnational financial services points to the micro-level networks pulled along in the wake of major global crises. One visualization of such systems can be found in Australian-based artists Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski’s artwork Seeker. An interactive and screen-based exploration of global migration, Seeker invites those that come across it (in a gallery setting) to input their own personal history of migration. The results of this personal survey become data points on a map of all submitted surveys, juxtaposed with satellite imagery, graph-like animations, and a grim news feed detailing deaths suffered while attempting to seek refuge in another country.

Our world is continually shaped and reshaped by patterns of mobility. In the United States, motorization and single-use zoning are the principal components of a system that depends upon long distance travel and cheap energy. In the developing world, the wasteful patterns of the West are being repeated in places like China and India where increased automobile and fuel use are quickly becoming the norm. In all parts of the world, city governments struggle to keep pace with the energy and mobility needs of their expanding populations. Tourism, migration, military conflict, and environmental disasters all keep human beings on the move. Many choose their destinations, while others are forced towards them. Our 21st century world may ride the precarious line between the temporary and the permanent, and the ecosystems plundered by our unquenchable energy needs might have the final word. Art, and other forms of cultural reflection, can help to make accessible the structures and systems that propel us. It falls to all of us as global citizens to redirect our governing institutions and cultural perceptions – or we may find ourselves facing the end of the road.

Claude Willey and Ryan Griffis

James Howard Kunstler The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, Atlantic Monthly 2005 p188.
Lester R. Brown Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, W.W. Norton 2006 p90.
Gabriel Rozenberg, Jonathan Clayton and Gary Duncan 'Thirst for Oil Fuels China's Grand Safari in Africa' Times Online http://business.timesonline.co.uk 7/1/2006

Edmund Sanders 'Oil's Promise Still a Dream' Los Angeles Times 7/9/2006
Eugene Linden, 'From Peak Oil To Dark Age?' BusinessWeek http://www.businessweek.com 6/25/2007
Joseph R. Des Jardins Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental Philosophy, Wadsworth 1997 p229.


This essay was written by the curators for publication in Artlink Magazine, with editing assistance by greenmuseum.org's Sam Bower. Research by Claude Willey, exhibit design by Ryan Griffis.

Thanks to Artlink, greenmuseum.org and all the artists for their contributions.

 

Highway Expedition Project - Brian Collier

Work: Highway Expedition (2007)

Artist: Brian Collier

Go to essay :: Go to project website

F.R.U.I.T. - Free Soil

Work. F.RU.I.T. (2006)

Artists: Free Soil

Go to essay :: Go to project website

Invisible 5

Work: Invisible 5 (2005)

Artists: Amy Balkin, Kim Stringfellow, Tim Halbur, Greenaction, Pond

Go to essay :: Go to project website

154,000 Breaths - kanarinka

Work: It Takes 154,000 Breaths to Evacuate Boston (2007)

Artist: kanarinka

Go to essay :: Go to project website

Oil Standard - Michael Mandiberg

Work: Oil Standard (2006)

Artist: Michael Mandiberg

Go to essay :: Go to project website

Notions of Expenditure - Laurie Palmer

Work: Notions of Expenditure (2005)

Artist: Laurie Palmer

Go to essay :: Go to project website

Unravelling the Carbon Web - Platform

Work: Unravelling the Carbon Web (2000-present)

Artists: Platform

Go to essay :: Go to project website

Seeker -

Work: Seeker (2006)

Artists: Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski

Go to essay :: Go to project website