<nettime> Introducing Petropolis

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

In Chicago we opened a significant exhibition:

http://www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2016/07/petcoke-project.php

The community partners of this project also succeeded in kicking the 
Koch brothers out of their backyards, which doesn't always happen. So 
they were able to really get into the work of Claire Pentecost, Terry 
Evans, Steve Rowell and many others.

My piece is here (zoom your view down for smaller screens):

http://environmentalobservatory.net/Petropolis/map.html

http://environmentalobservatory.net/Petropolis/Petropolis_install.jpg 
 (thx SR)

It's the most complex thing I've ever done (also part of the 
Anthropocene Campus at HKW Berlin) and seems to point the way to a new 
form of activist cultural critique. The intro is below - BH

***

*What’s in a map?*

In this case, a local environmental justice movement and a global mode 
of production/consumption, both revolving around petroleum.

*Petropolis* is a networked map/archive combining open-source software, 
public information, citizen and corporate journalism, direct observation 
by individuals and groups, plus original contributions by engaged 
artists. The story begins on the South Side of Chicago in the Calumet 
region, and expands to metropolitan, continental and global scales. 
Icons and colored lines represent industrial installations, power 
plants, ports, railroads and pipelines, as well as sites of crucial 
events. Click on any of these and you will find images, narratives, 
information, links, videos and sometimes even fiction or poetry. Here 
and there, icons of animals appear: they have been chosen by 
participating artists to signal their contributions. On the ground in 
the Calumet region, wide-open vigilant eyes link to portraits of 
community activists, who took a stand against the dusty piles of petcoke 
polluting their neighborhoods.

Maps have ever been a resource for the curious, but also for colonizers 
and seekers of buried treasure. This map is made for those who are 
curious about the viscous fluid that powers our daily lives and changes 
our daily weather, namely oil. In the Chicago area it is refined at 
three major industrial sites and it is used everywhere there is a road, 
an airport, a chemical plant, a steel mill, an oil-burning heater or 
even a lawn mower in the back yard. The seekers of buried treasure are 
also indicated on the map, whether in the Gulf of Mexico, where the 
unforgettable Deepwater Horizon oil spill occurred, or in the Bakken 
region of North Dakota, where explosive crude is put on trains that roll 
across the US, or in the great strip mines and steam-heated wells of the 
Tar Sands region in Alberta, where a gooey, carbon-heavy sludge is 
extracted and sent south to the Midwest, bearing its hidden cargo of 
petcoke, a tar sands by-product that burns hotter and exhales more 
greenhouse gases than coal. Amid all this, the map also shows something 
extremely hopeful: the routes of major pipelines, mostly in Canada, 
whose construction has been halted by a combination of indigenous and 
settler-colonial activism.

A project like this one is a labor of love and of holy dread, 
supplemented by the care, discipline, inspiration and audacity of untold 
numbers of people, without whose work – images, files, research 
programs, databases, organizing campaigns, direct actions, etc – it 
simply would not exist. Like the photographer described by Walker Evans, 
the contemporary multimedia mapmaker carries out an “editing of 
society.” The gaze is here directed toward vast infrastructures, crude 
raw materials, deep holes in the crust of the earth, and to ourselves, 
the inhabitants of Petropolis, who live in its towers, roll on its 
roads, breathe its residues and struggle to understand or maybe even 
transform what our contemporaries and our forefathers, particularly 
those wielding money and power, have so heedlessly created. Can we see 
beyond the industrial horizon? Every crack in the asphalt reveals the 
persistent vitality of what used to be called nature.

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