elegies for oil spills (and other poetic tactics

For the past year, Mirko Febbo and I have been collaborating on works that take our interests out of classrooms and into the world. We’ve aimed to develop means of translating these topics into more accessible and engaging mediums that go beyond text and data to immersive experiences, translating this tacit knowledge into tangible formats. 2024 was a year of experimentation, following the principles I had established at the beginning of the year.

Our most recent project emerged from the question: “how do we counter the embodied ethos of extraction that underlies both digital and physical life?” - as informed by our training in ethnographic methods and sculpture, respectively.

!exhibit of elegies for oil spills

We exhibited ‘Elegies for oil spills’, in Amsterdam for EASST-4S (an annual conference for Science and Technology scholars) in July, an annual conference for science and technology studies where we were lucky enough to won the ‘Making & Doing’ prize for applied STS work.

You can learn more in this video recording about STS work

The pr following questions:

• Can a machine mourn for the climate?

• ⁠If an oil spill could speak, what would it say?

• ⁠What can machine mimicry tell us about narratives of oil (and its spillage)?

Using data about world’s largest oil spills, ‘Elegies for Oil Spills’ generates speculative artefacts about environmental disasters – printed on (recycled) thermal paper in the form of a receipt. 

The receipt is twice generated by the machine, housed in a literal black box. First, the elegy (a style of poem usually written in the context of death) is generated using AI (specifically, ChatGPT – one of the largest language models in the world) and information about the oil spill scraped from news articles. Using the poem, an image is generated in the Brutalist style that depicts or interprets the input.

It was interesting to bring This piece was also invited to participate in the ‘Into the Flux’ exhibition at the International Body of Art in London, UK in October 2024 and the School of Commons Annual Assembly in February 2025.

We also exhibited the installation ‘trace’ at the Mozilla Festival in Amsterdam in June 2024, an art, tech and society convening, in Amsterdam where participants were able to touch a physical globe, triggering sounds from across the routes of technology supply chains. 

Both of these two projects are a part of a series exploring how poetic tactics can counter resource extraction practices, titled “poetic tactics to counter extraction, and other ways to train attention”.

As an Artist Fellow at the School of Commons at the Zurich School of the Arts, we have been investigating the meeting point between the abstraction of poetry, the process of datafication, and extractive processes through audio recordings and sensory practices more specifically. ‘Elegies for Oil Spills’ is part of the series ‘Poetic Tactics to Counter Extraction (and other ways to train attention), hosted at the ‘School of Commons’, based at the Zurich University of the Arts and online. This work is a collaboration between Mirko Febbo, a sculptor turned data visualization and creative computation expert, and Anne Lee Steele, an anthropologist, data journalist, and multimedia artist.

This installation has previously been exhibited at EASST-4s, International Body of Art, and School of Commons Assembly throughout 2024.