One of my favourite videos is a striking self-promo clip commissioned by Shell in 1970s. The tech optimism is strong, with visuals that would feel much more at home in a climate shock video nowadays. the video captures the otherworldliness of oil production and large scale infrastructure in a hypnotic way. It really is quite beautiful.
Or Baraka and Samsara if you'd prefer films of the same tradition, minus the somewhat over-the-top Philip Glass scores (which I enjoy more on their own than as part of the films).
Which is ironic as the vast majority of the human population, including the very same people with such views, are only alive because of substantial amounts of machinery. Such as those used in the Haber-Bosch process.
Not very long ago the average human was David and Nature was Goliath. Vast swaths of land seemed to be unbreakable by mankind, yet now the tables have turned and for many it's cringe-worthy to watch the big Humans pummeling the land with ease at a rate where the land can put up no defense
Well, I am certainly as far from techno-phobia as it might be possible, but oil rigs are examples of machinery which are connected to large damages to the environment. Not so much the machines themselves, but the oil they have been pumping. See also those - by themselves - magnificient excavators to dig for lignite. Great machinery, but if you consider the outcome, it is very dystropian.
Nevertheless, they are engineering marvels and as such quite a view to behold.
Wow! Hard to believe that’s produced by Shell. A outside of any environmental or idealogical perspective, I found it deeply unsettling just on a visual and auditory level.
There is a documentary about a concert at the bottom of the sea, really way down in the 'basement' of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_A_platform which is 303 meters under the water surface:
It's about an hour long, mostly showing the preparation of the singer, and the crew, like security/emergency training, to be even allowed to get on, and then down there. Thereby showing how it is out there. Interesting. One can omit the last half hour, or so, if uninterested in the music, or skip around that.
>with visuals that would feel much more at home in a climate shock video nowadays
That's likely because there's huge overlap between "climate shock video" and "video from decades past when big industry was visibly polluting things in the west" and "video filtered to look like it is from decades past". Basically you're pattern matching on the second order visual cues. A video of a pit mine full of modern equipment taken with a modern camera in 1080p or better wouldn't look the same so you wouldn't mentally bucket it the same way.
I think what I like so much about the aesthetic is that it its age allows me to quickly forget the second order effects of industrialization and quickly, quietly appreciate the sheer magnificence of these extraction cathedrals, the total celebration of our ability to harness nature, to defy the balance of the world in our favour. If my suspention of disbelief is paused for a minute, i recollect the opening scenes of Dr. Strangelove, where the refuelling of the bomber planes looks more like a avian pairing ritual than a technocratic feat of usurping the laws of nature. A few scenes in the shell video definitely have a phallic quality to it (like the drill bit penetrating the water, the pipes laid across the forest floor), and I even felt a moment of self referential criticism as the camera panned across the bleak oilfield in the middle of the ocean expanse.
I think I disagree on the point about the "medium is the message" framing. I dont think the camera quality has much to do with it, instead the visual qualities arise from the lack of a need to show that critical view, as the blank optimism overshadowed the less savory views by a mile. I think we have lost the capacity to view these process neutrally, independently of the medium used to record them.
I remember watching a hungarian film called On body and soul, which takes place in a meat processing facility. The footage of the meat processing is beautiful, eerily so, and it is really jaunting when you realize the only images of slaughterhouses you have seen is grainy handycam footage filmed for ideological purposes. The medium is always important, but always subservient to the gaze.
I found the video eons ago, it still has so few views and I am so happy to have brought it to light to such a receptive crowd.
If this piqued anyone's interest in oil/gas rigs, an engineering disasters podcast I like ("Well, there's your problem") covered a couple of North Sea rig catastrophes in detail that may interest you:
Just as a quick content warning: engineering disasters involving loss of life are not exactly a jolly affair, but the Byford Dolphin ep has a few grisly details that make it unsuitable for the faint of heart.
edit: Just thought I should clarify why this popped into my head because it might seem a little morbid otherwise. I'm from the North East of Scotland where there have been a few of these disasters that hit the headlines, and my dad and plenty of friends worked in oil. This meant I got a lot of exposure to this, so "oil rig" is connected with "disaster" in my head, and now decades later finding out why these things happened was fascinating.
IMHO This type of beauty is something the "AI" image generators do far failed to reproduce.
Sure, they are great at creating "out of this world" images but the beauty of those structures comes from our ability to reason about the features. When you look at these structures, you immediately begin thinking about what is this and why it is there and how would the life on it feel. It has logical cohesion.
When I was a kid I loved (who am I kidding, I still love them) the Incredible Cross-Sections books which have exploded-view drawings of tons of machines, real and fictional. The oil rig in particular sticks out in my mind because that’s how I learned they were movable and had their own engines. Seeing all the different parts and what they were for was fascinating.
Don't know why you're being downvoted, it's obvious you are right. "AI art" is a style transfer and NLP tool. It doesn't exactly produce visual work with meaning, other than by accident.
I think it's similar thing with hands, we immediately see the problem with the hands because we know how they work and recognise when the generated hands wouldn't work.
This expands to all kind of machinery actually. The moment you start reasoning about the output it falls apart. I only assume at some point there would be another AI model which is trained on how things work and will guide the current AI stuff.
Like the way ControlNet guides StableDiffusion to produce output the way the user desires.
Artists are trained in things like perspective, shadows, etc... They often devote a good amount of time drawing people right maybe, study basic principles like mass distribution, but they don't know everything about the underlying principles. For example, I have a painting of a harbor with a few sailboats, it looks great until you realize that sails take the wind from different directions, as if each boat had their own wind. Unless the artist really has a strong focus on realism, sometimes involving collaboration with experts in the field of what they are drawing, you are going to find mistakes like these everywhere.
They of course can ---- if you know about this kind of thing in the first place. I don't really think AI can actually create new stuff -- best they can do is random sampling in some clusters, or going total cliched random, like what happens when you ask GPT to complete a <|endoftext|> token.
Oh these are nice. They are the modern equivalent, in a way, of the industrial photos of Bernd and Hill Becher [1], who with and archivist's diligence sought out, cataloged and captured industrial sites (often now long decommissioned and disappeared). It captures a picture of an era gone or disappearing.
If you have the chance: check out on of their exhibitions. I saw it back in December in SFMOMA. It's a special and humbling experience to see wall after wall full of all kinds of variations on the same industrial theme, like water towers. (almost like they were generated by a NN, and the Bechers just played with temperature, prompts to create variations...)
You could say the same of these oil rigs: Massive feats of human engineering and ingenuity, worth capturing for eternity, as over time many of them might disappear or will be replaced.
When I rode from John o' Groats to Land's End[1] I remember riding past a firth on the east coast of Scotland with a load of oil rigs ready for either refitting or decommissioning.
It was crazy surreal. The landscape is an amazing backdrop anyway but these things are just so big, so weird looking and so out of place... it felt like being party to an alien invasion.
It made me think of the John Christopher classic The Tripods.
--
1. See how I casually worked that in like I ride it every week. :P
What used to happen--and I assume still does--is that during periods of slack demand some older rigs will get decommissioned but serviceable rigs that just didn't have work for them at the moment would get "stacked" with some minimal skeleton crew for maintenance. In Texas, Sabine Pass was a common spot to stack rigs.
if you've never seen the refineries on the US Gulf Coast it's worth a road trip. Super surreal, miles and miles of dense piping and machinery. I don't really have words to describe except it's something you'd expect to see in a sci-fi anime and not in real life. Just these massive complexes as big as small cities in a web of pipes of all sizes going in all directions.
edit: they remind me of the scene in Aliens toward the end when Ripley is standing on the platform waiting for Bishop to pick her up. Minus the fire and explosions though ( well usually heh ).
My father did computer hardware work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico up til I was conceived and he decided to get a less dangerous job at IBM. My entire childhood he had a picture on his desk he took from the evac boat of the oil rig he worked on in flames after some accident a few years before I was born. So yeah, definitely only usually!
Back in the early 2000s I was debugging obscene memory usage for our GPS navigation application for symbian phones, and that was the exact route I used to debug it!
As an aside, deep sea oil drilling and production platforms are incredible put-a-man-on-the-moon engineering feats. If oil weren't politically unpopular, the engineering behind these would be celebrated and admired.
I mean my brother is working in a company that's building oil drilling and refining equipment and had made a few periods on off-shore vessels and he always has a few interesting stories to tell
At the risk of being pedantic, all the ones I saw are production platforms. Oil rigs/drilling rigs more typically refer to mobile exploratory drilling rigs. (Though colloquially "oil rigs" is widely used.)
I'm sure that's fair. I was in the offshore drilling industry for a few years so I'm more aware of the nuances (at least on the exploratory drilling side) than most.
I have always found beauty in machinery and the like, probably because I grew up in a city with a romanticized industrial past. I find this kind of stuff especially beautiful since I began playing Factorio.
If a man doesn't find modern machinery beautiful and inspiring then he really doesn't understand human condition for the most of human history. These machines brought us from poverty and misery unimaginable today.
> These machines brought us from poverty and misery unimaginable today.
This has to be it. My ancestors quality of life skyrocketed somewhere in the early to mid 20th century. Before that, they were mostly peasants and journeymen, for hundreds if not thousands of years. Ironically, machines gave millions of people the chance to express their humanity, mostly via social mobility and rights we now take for granted.
Readit News
https://youtu.be/_zWjT59S_wk
If you're in to that kind of stuff check out Koyaanisqatsi & Powaqqatsi
0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8BZd7IBr2Y&t=3
It's in my top 5 "must watch" movies.
Nevertheless, they are engineering marvels and as such quite a view to behold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YtCHHpZNxo
It's about an hour long, mostly showing the preparation of the singer, and the crew, like security/emergency training, to be even allowed to get on, and then down there. Thereby showing how it is out there. Interesting. One can omit the last half hour, or so, if uninterested in the music, or skip around that.
Maybe it's just because of There Will Be Blood.
That's likely because there's huge overlap between "climate shock video" and "video from decades past when big industry was visibly polluting things in the west" and "video filtered to look like it is from decades past". Basically you're pattern matching on the second order visual cues. A video of a pit mine full of modern equipment taken with a modern camera in 1080p or better wouldn't look the same so you wouldn't mentally bucket it the same way.
I think I disagree on the point about the "medium is the message" framing. I dont think the camera quality has much to do with it, instead the visual qualities arise from the lack of a need to show that critical view, as the blank optimism overshadowed the less savory views by a mile. I think we have lost the capacity to view these process neutrally, independently of the medium used to record them.
I remember watching a hungarian film called On body and soul, which takes place in a meat processing facility. The footage of the meat processing is beautiful, eerily so, and it is really jaunting when you realize the only images of slaughterhouses you have seen is grainy handycam footage filmed for ideological purposes. The medium is always important, but always subservient to the gaze.
I found the video eons ago, it still has so few views and I am so happy to have brought it to light to such a receptive crowd.
- Piper Alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVaMNHQQCs0
- Byford Dolphin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azThd0R7Bt0
Just as a quick content warning: engineering disasters involving loss of life are not exactly a jolly affair, but the Byford Dolphin ep has a few grisly details that make it unsuitable for the faint of heart.
edit: Just thought I should clarify why this popped into my head because it might seem a little morbid otherwise. I'm from the North East of Scotland where there have been a few of these disasters that hit the headlines, and my dad and plenty of friends worked in oil. This meant I got a lot of exposure to this, so "oil rig" is connected with "disaster" in my head, and now decades later finding out why these things happened was fascinating.
Sure, they are great at creating "out of this world" images but the beauty of those structures comes from our ability to reason about the features. When you look at these structures, you immediately begin thinking about what is this and why it is there and how would the life on it feel. It has logical cohesion.
https://i.imgur.com/oiMObcE.jpeg
This expands to all kind of machinery actually. The moment you start reasoning about the output it falls apart. I only assume at some point there would be another AI model which is trained on how things work and will guide the current AI stuff.
Like the way ControlNet guides StableDiffusion to produce output the way the user desires.
Artists are trained in things like perspective, shadows, etc... They often devote a good amount of time drawing people right maybe, study basic principles like mass distribution, but they don't know everything about the underlying principles. For example, I have a painting of a harbor with a few sailboats, it looks great until you realize that sails take the wind from different directions, as if each boat had their own wind. Unless the artist really has a strong focus on realism, sometimes involving collaboration with experts in the field of what they are drawing, you are going to find mistakes like these everywhere.
Deleted Comment
If you have the chance: check out on of their exhibitions. I saw it back in December in SFMOMA. It's a special and humbling experience to see wall after wall full of all kinds of variations on the same industrial theme, like water towers. (almost like they were generated by a NN, and the Bechers just played with temperature, prompts to create variations...)
You could say the same of these oil rigs: Massive feats of human engineering and ingenuity, worth capturing for eternity, as over time many of them might disappear or will be replaced.
[1] https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/becher#
It was crazy surreal. The landscape is an amazing backdrop anyway but these things are just so big, so weird looking and so out of place... it felt like being party to an alien invasion.
It made me think of the John Christopher classic The Tripods.
--
1. See how I casually worked that in like I ride it every week. :P
edit: they remind me of the scene in Aliens toward the end when Ripley is standing on the platform waiting for Bishop to pick her up. Minus the fire and explosions though ( well usually heh ).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/suncor-prepares-to-reop...
And it's the Gulf Coast where there can be a lot this for miles, it's 24/7. Flaring is of course, "normal":
https://www.facebook.com/KRIS6News/videos/live-view-from-our...
For my life's work I needed to become very comfortable working in this environment, especially where the big ships are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW9Frtkqy3Y
Dystopias are us.
I believe Ridley Scott was inspired by the steel works of Sheffield at night to create the landscape of Blade Runner.
Similarly it wouldn't surprise at all if James Cameron used Gulf Coast oil refineries for inspiration.
Heavy industry is a raw old sight.
That said, what does exploratory mean in this context?
This has to be it. My ancestors quality of life skyrocketed somewhere in the early to mid 20th century. Before that, they were mostly peasants and journeymen, for hundreds if not thousands of years. Ironically, machines gave millions of people the chance to express their humanity, mostly via social mobility and rights we now take for granted.