One of my favourite videos is a striking self-promo clip commissioned by Shell in 1970s. The tech optimism is strong, with visuals that would feel much more at home in a climate shock video nowadays. the video captures the otherworldliness of oil production and large scale infrastructure in a hypnotic way. It really is quite beautiful.
The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
31–40 of 151 posts
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#32I have always found beauty in machinery and the like, probably because I grew up in a city with a romanticized industrial past. I find this kind of stuff especially beautiful since I began playing Factorio.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#33When I rode from John o' Groats to Land's End[1] I remember riding past a firth on the east coast of Scotland with a load of oil rigs ready for either refitting or decommissioning. It was crazy surreal. The landscape is an amazing backdrop anyway but these things are just so big, so weird looking and so out of place... it felt like being party to an alien invasion. It made me think of the John Christopher classic The…
I believe you've probably seen these in Cromarty Firth, featured in this Tim Traveller's YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSOaHpydv8
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#34When I rode from John o' Groats to Land's End[1] I remember riding past a firth on the east coast of Scotland with a load of oil rigs ready for either refitting or decommissioning. It was crazy surreal. The landscape is an amazing backdrop anyway but these things are just so big, so weird looking and so out of place... it felt like being party to an alien invasion. It made me think of the John Christopher classic The…
I believe you've probably seen these in Cromarty Firth, featured in this Tim Traveller's YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSOaHpydv8
I think you could be right!
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#35I have always found beauty in machinery and the like, probably because I grew up in a city with a romanticized industrial past. I find this kind of stuff especially beautiful since I began playing Factorio.
If a man doesn't find modern machinery beautiful and inspiring then he really doesn't understand human condition for the most of human history. These machines brought us from poverty and misery unimaginable today.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#36That's beauty? Surely something must be lodged in the eye of whatever beholder wrote that. These blocks of rust look far more Borg than Begonia.
It says "dystopian beauty". A begonia is not dystopian beauty.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#37I agree it is beautiful, but in a strange way. Most construction results in familiar forms. Arbitrary choices are few because the problem has been sufficiently solved. I am floored by the diversity in the forms here. I am not all that thrilled with the aesthetic by itself.
They look roughly like one would imagine Vogon spaceships to.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#38The Rig (2023) is a mysterious miniseries set entirely on an oil rig off Scotland. It feels like they're on a spaceship, isolated from terra firma and the rest of humanity. Starring Ser Jorah Mormont from GoT and Stevie Budd from Schitt's Creek.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#39I have always found beauty in machinery and the like, probably because I grew up in a city with a romanticized industrial past. I find this kind of stuff especially beautiful since I began playing Factorio.
If a man doesn't find modern machinery beautiful and inspiring then he really doesn't understand human condition for the most of human history. These machines brought us from poverty and misery unimaginable today.
> These machines brought us from poverty and misery unimaginable today.
This has to be it. My ancestors quality of life skyrocketed somewhere in the early to mid 20th century. Before that, they were mostly peasants and journeymen, for hundreds if not thousands of years. Ironically, machines gave millions of people the chance to express their humanity, mostly via social mobility and rights we now take for granted.
Re: The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
#40Oh these are nice. They are the modern equivalent, in a way, of the industrial photos of Bernd and Hill Becher [1], who with and archivist's diligence sought out, cataloged and captured industrial sites (often now long decommissioned and disappeared). It captures a picture of an era gone or disappearing.
If you have the chance: check out on of their exhibitions. I saw it back in December in SFMOMA. It's a special and humbling experience to see wall after wall full of all kinds of variations on the same industrial theme, like water towers. (almost like they were generated by a NN, and the Bechers just played with temperature, prompts to create variations...)
You could say the same of these oil rigs: Massive feats of human engineering and ingenuity, worth capturing for eternity, as over time many of them might disappear or will be replaced.