Can Art Give Reality to Oil Spill’s Size?
For months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, BP, the government, and independent scientists argued publicly over how much oil was gushing from the seafloor: 40,000 gallons a day, 200,000 gallons a day, 1 million gallons a day. Now the latest official estimate is 2.5 million gallons a day on average over the 87-day span until the well was capped.
Sounds huge, doesn’t it? Still, it’s just a number to most people -- an abstraction, almost impossible to get your head around.
But then you stand in a three-walled booth about the size of a college dorm room, watching high-definition video footage of a plume of oil projected onto a 12-by-11-foot wall. It looks like smoke at first glance, but soon enough, a tether or a piece of robotic arm will bob into the frame and set off a stream of bubbles, and it becomes clear that this is underwater footage of the Deepwater Horizon leak, which you recognize from television or from staring at it on a webpage.
The perspective changes slightly as the camera floats and shifts, but the orange-black plume itself keeps shooting into the ocean with a steady force. It creates a hypnotic effect that is actually sort of beautiful. While you’re pondering the irony of this, at some point you become aware that two white screens on either side of you are filling up with dark orange. If you stand there long enough, the orange will reach the top, and then the whole process will start over again. The loop takes 7 minutes and 45 seconds, because that’s how long it would take for the booth you are standing in to fill with oil from BP’s damaged well at the same rate that it spewed into the ocean.
This is Sweet Crude, an attempt to turn the image that so many of us came to most associate with the BP spill -- the eerie, somewhat-grainy, hard-to-make-out underwater footage -- into art, and through that art, achieve a kind of understanding. It was developed by New York artists John Ensor Parker and Johnny Moreno.
"During the spill, hearing the news made me extremely angry and extremely sad, but I also started thinking that I wanted to find a way to make all of this scientific information visual," Parker explains. He grew up in the Florida panhandle and worked as a mechanical engineer in Tallahassee for 12 years before moving to New York in 2006 and becoming an artist. Parker spent his adolescence surfing and windsurfing in the Gulf, and his family stills lives nearby, so the news reports about the spill had personal significance to him. His engineering background also made him particularly interested in the work of the Flow Rate Technical Group, the team of fluid experts, engineers, and other scientists that the federal government assembled in May to determine how much oil was escaping from the underwater well.
"You kept hearing it reported as 50 thousand barrels per day or 60 thousand barrels per day, but still, what does that really mean?" Parker says. "I have a degree in mechanical engineering, and I still couldn’t really picture it."
During the spill, the Flow Rate Technical Group used high-definition footage from a camera mounted atop a robotic arm near the leaking pipe to develop ongoing estimates. When Parker heard that the footage had been released to Congressman Ed Markey, chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, an idea for turning information into art crystallized. He called his friend, filmmaker Johnny Moreno, and the two began planning their collaboration.
After several weeks of hounding Markey’s staff, they finally got the OK to use the Flow Rate Technical Group’s footage. "We went to D.C. and spent eight hours in the committee office downloading video," Parker says. He and Moreno now share exclusive access to the footage with Spike Lee (who is planning to use it in an upcoming documentary). Until Parker and Moreno unveiled their video installation last month in Brooklyn as part of the DUMBO Arts Festival, it had never been seen by the public.
Of course, plenty of other footage of the leak -- including a video feed that BP posted on its own website at the time -- has been shown online and on TV, but the high-definition clarity and slightly expanded scale of Sweet Crude gives the art project a hyper-real effect.
Parker also developed a related piece for the arts festival in which some of the same footage was projected onto the Manhattan Bridge anchorage. That context, in which the image was blown up much larger and shown in the middle of the Brooklyn cityscape, displaced much of the meaning. The image of the plume was still visually powerful, but it’s really the simple presentation of the footage alongside the real-time visualization of the flow rate -- in a way that also places the viewer smack in the middle of the disaster -- that provides concrete meaning to the numbers that we’ve all heard but failed to process.
