Out of Scale
An Oil Story
Marie Porrez
A big part of the research for me was trying to understand what is actually happening out there, and how do we as humans relate to an industry that has a scale which we can hardly start to understand.
With my project and the video I made I wanted to show how the whole cycle works. And therefor it was really important for me to start from a situation we all know: the gas station.From this point it all starts and it is really interesting to go back to everything that had to happen before, just so we could get a little bit of oil for our cars.
My main intention is very clearly explained and inspired by this quote I read in the first text we had to read for this course: “Artists create work to help people see the unseen, to sense what they cannot sense, to understand the world in a different way. There is a failure in that there are very few images of the Anthropocene that are very impactful. As artists, there is a challenge to communicate that... I really believe in visual literacy and there are very few images of the Anthropocene and the unseen that are convincing.”
Which all started from the idea of telling the story of the ocean giant Draugen. And ended up in showing everything it is connected to.
The method in which I wanted to do this is inspired by a text called ‘Leviathan in the Aquarium’. To see the aquarium as a way to understand the bigger ocean. To frame a portion of the underwater world to show an unframeablewhole.And to really confront ourselveswith the friction between our selfish economic worries and the expansive scales of the Earth.It is a sort of microcosm that renders the ocean in a visible, comprehensible way and provides us something for reflection and action. By trying to make people wonder, aspiring them to build a world beyond the suffocating values of the economy.