Professor Graeme Macdonald examines the way a “noiseless” and “smooth” mode of non-disruptive transition from oil to renewables has been employed as a stealth move by some corporate actors and governments seeking to control the social and material infrastructures of the energy transition. Macdonald will discuss how a form of seamless translation from one form to another is often deployed as a seductive guarantee of a successful global transition, involving the quieting of disruption. This is an approach that has roots in oil’s long phase of naturalisation and reproduction, where silence, invisibility and obfuscation are, and were, key and heavily critiqued in world petrofiction and film.
To explore how contemporary ‘after-oil’ gestures confront a similar condition, Macdonald will focus on two short wordless films of North Sea oil infrastructure in transition, by visual and sound artists: Stephen Hurrel’s 2012 “Dead Reckoning” and Emily Richardson’s 2005 “Petrolia.” Both offer ambivalent images of oil in transition that rest on thresholds between sound, gestures of movement, silence and dissonance. Macdonald questions whether these short films offer a means to perceive what cultural anthropologist Dominic Boyer identifies as the ‘murmurs’ of energopower, felt through the ‘signals of the energo-material transferences and transformations’ of the post-oil landscape.
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