Poetics

My goal for this project was to witness the disaster of the oil spill, while highlighting the sacrifice of marine life that inevitably occurs in the process, all the while linking this to the overarching value of the enabling of a lifestyle that comes with the everyday use of oil. I use the city as an example throughout my testimonial (as well as the emblem) as something that cannot exist without the use of oil. Therefore, if oil needs to occur for the creation of the city, then oil spill must also (the creation of the oil spill, the disaster).

I wanted people to make a direct connection to what was sacrificed (sea turtles, coral, and even the industries that rely on them), to what was gained (an easier, oil filled way of life full of travel, foreign resources and foods). To do this, especially in them emblem, I added pictures of dead animals almost like stain glass biblical scenes that occur in churches. Like the martyr who died for God, these animals died for our way of life, the oceans died for us.

I think this becomes more clear in my testimonial. I wanted to rely on the punctum of wreckage pictures in order to stir the emotions of people who do not live in the gulf. This was also achieved by the video of the woman who became very sick by cleaning oil from her own local beaches. To avoid information overload from the BP oil spill, I had to use very specific examples of places that were effected (Pensacola, Grand Isle), as well as what really was affected (tourist/fishing industry and many people’s jobs and livelihoods, as well as the marine life itself).  That was how I wanted these events to be witnessed, and I used the BP oil spill as my main example because it is recent and fresh in peoples minds. This testimonial was supposed to show a side of the story that people didn’t see in the news (not just BP’s executives apologizing, and stats about the spill). I did feel obligated to give the very basic facts about the spill because they are very powerful and should be able to elicit an emotional response from the viewer (like 4.9 Million barrels that were discharged into the sea).

At first, I thought it would be much harder to show the abject value enabling the multiple oil spills of our decade (which I also include in the testimonial). In the emblem, the location of Times Square is metaphoric of this consumer lifestyle that we live in that can only occur with the use of copious amounts of oil. Uncovering this “blind-spot” was much easier in the testimonial, where I had almost 10 posts in order to make my point. In the testimonial, I go into better detail of explaining this, showing that food, steel for buildings, and even the people itself must be shipped into the city in order for it to exist. I attempt to achieve this once again by using specific examples and showing how the world economy operates; that steel is shipped from Minnesota, fruit/vegetable from California, Coffee from Kenya, and oil from Saudi Arabia. I also needed people to see that nearly everything that they use, buy, see commercials for, have needed oil in order to get into their hands. That is very much part of our collective witnessing of the disaster; we enable and witness it every time we use our iPhone, or drive a Prius, or eat and orange that didn’t grow in your backyard. We as a society collectively are all part of the cause of the spill, and uncovering this idea to others should create a mood in itself. When I was making this project, I began to feel not guilty, but very much helpless to the oil spill disaster. Especially at the point where I researched how many more offshore oil rigs are being built, and how much oil our world uses. Even if I wanted to stop this, I couldn’t, I would have to change the entire world’s economy and way of life (which is impossible). This is the mood that I want people to feel and understand by being witnesses, that we are guilty but helpless to the problem, and that marine life will continue to be sacrificed as long as oil is being used at such a high rate (which it will, it’s use is increasing exponentially).