Welcome! I'm Anne Lee Steele.
2024 - 2025

elegies for oil spills

‘Elegies for Oil Spills’ is an interactive installation about ecological death.

Using open data about world’s largest oil spills, ‘Elegies’ generates speculative artefacts about environmental disasters – printed on (recycled) thermal paper in the form of a receipt. These speculative objects ask three questions:

  1. Can a machine mourn for the climate?

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

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

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 and interprets the input.

exhibit of elegies for oil spills

We first debuted ‘Elegies’ at EASST-4S, an annual conference for Science and Technology studies in July 2024. The project was awarded the Making & Doing prize by the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4s) for applied STS work. See below for the interview:

alt: an image of rows of receipts tapped to a white wall.

This installation has since been exhibited at a variety of venues over the past few years. They range from academic conferences to galleries, and in the process, the work has engaged with very different audiences.

This has been interesting to engage with, as some focused more on the aesthetics of the installation, while others are drawn to the data-driven aspects, while still others focus more on conceptual rigor: asking questions about for whom this project was for, not simply how it worked.

Exhibitions:

  • EASST-4s (Amsterdam, NL, July 2024)
  • International Body of Art (London, UK, October 2024),
  • The School of Commons Assembly (Zurich, CH, March 2025)
  • AIxDesign (Amsterdam, NL, July 2025).
  • Geomob (London, UK, June 2025)
  • Gray Zone Festival (San Francisco, CA, April 2026) (upcoming)

It will be shown at a Gray Zone exhibition in San Francisco, CA in 2026.

This work is a collaboration between Mirko Febbo, a sculptor turned data visualization and creative computation expert, and Anne Lee Steele.