The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
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Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#2[dead]
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#3Highly recommend this related short story by China Miéville: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/22/china-mieville...
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#4I find only the very first pic somehow appealing. I do not really see any "beauty" there.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#5Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#6I find only the very first pic somehow appealing. I do not really see any "beauty" there.
For me number 5, Draugen, is mesmerizing. I don't know the population of such a platform but seeing it from far way supported by a single pillar gives me anxiety.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#7At the risk of being pedantic, all the ones I saw are production platforms. Oil rigs/drilling rigs more typically refer to mobile exploratory drilling rigs. (Though colloquially "oil rigs" is widely used.)
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#8I find only the very first pic somehow appealing. I do not really see any "beauty" there.
I don't think there is a word to express the melancholic fascination with megastructures, but I certainly suffer from it:
...the intricate patterns of stairs, windows, pergolas and cables, the chaotic and seemingly random arrangement of supports, the organic tumefying rust that de-patterns the otherwise perfect recursiveness...
it is the same feeling that makes one appreciate kowloon walled city and Tsutomu Nihei's superb early works, to give two examples
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#9IMHO This type of beauty is something the "AI" image generators do far failed to reproduce.
Sure, they are great at creating "out of this world" images but the beauty of those structures comes from our ability to reason about the features. When you look at these structures, you immediately begin thinking about what is this and why it is there and how would the life on it feel. It has logical cohesion.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#10I find only the very first pic somehow appealing. I do not really see any "beauty" there.
For me number 5, Draugen, is mesmerizing. I don't know the population of such a platform but seeing it from far way supported by a single pillar gives me anxiety.
Oh, why? That pillar isn't even 300m ;)
There were three shifts of 43 people there many years ago, I expect the number will have changed a little since.