It was our drive to see and know everything that made us discover their oily presence, everywhere.

Hyperobjects - Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

Timothy Morton | 2013

~~~ ABOUT ~~~

PDC bits perform for our pleasure, our energy - powering through hard rock to extract toxic sludge from deep under ground via oil rigs and wells. Not a fantasy term, ‘boring penetration’ grooves holes and makes thick, grungy waves, enabling money to spill and slick from a Pandora’s box of dark, foreboding treasure buried below the seabed. The tool is pivotal to dirty energy, which alters ecosystems, forever.

Hard/drive exposes how this slick machination reverberates the ecology of the sea, ‘In 1818, inspired by the head of the shipworm, Teredo navalis, which could bore through ship’s timbers, Marc Brunel patented a tunnelling shield made from iron.’ This mechanisation, determined in part by the humble, tunnel boring mollusc triggered the consumption of fossil fuels creating waves of environmental fallout - from climate heating to sea level rise. This grinding perversion of natural ecology has spawned a world in which human, animal and environment - all - are being annihilated by economic leveraging.

/// ‘Some of the most basic lessons we can learn from ecosystems everywhere are that almost all energy that drives ecological cycles flows from the sun. Even the kinetic energy of wind, waves and marine currents ultimately derives from the sun’s energy reaching the Earth. Our industrial civilization, on the other hand, is driven by fossil fuel reserves in the form of coal, gas and oil, along with some other non-renewable sources like nuclear energy.

Fossil fuels are nothing but ancient sunlight (Hartman, 1999) stored in the Earth’s crust. These energy carriers are the compressed and transformed remains of plants and animals that populated Earth millions of years ago. The amount of fossil fuel humanity is currently using in a single year took approximately 1 million years to build up in the Earth’s crust (Fischer, 2012: 36).' Hence, ‘non-renewable’. Daniel Christian Wahl O ///

Centring on the oil industry and expanding beyond, Hard/drive deploys a sexual analogy of the Polycrystalline Diamond Compact (PDC) bit - enmeshing the petrochecemical industry, 80s pop culture, petro-masculinity and humour via this research website archive.

/// Extinction: The Facts is a 2020 documentary film by the natural historian David Attenborough which is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK. It depicts the continuing sixth mass extinction, caused by humans, and the consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change. It also suggests positive action which can be taken to halt or reverse these effects.

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. Netflix trailer

Wikipedia ///

Hard/drive has four spin-off projects, which follow a twist on its narrative to explore the many compounding ways in which the oil industry seeps through culture. In combination, the pentalogy mines the depths of interplaying socio-economic conditions to draw on entangled relations between organic and machinic ecologies - interweaving a seemingly mythical -  yet, mysteriously true - tale of the ecology between PDC drill bits and shipworms. All together, these five bodies of work coalesce - forming a strange deep dive into the environmental crises, and many of the cultural and political conditions defining it - shining a light on a private part of this shady underworld.

/// 'The Anthropocene, the geological epoch driven by vaguely generalizing “human activities,” fails to capture the divisions and antagonism at play here. “Capitalocene,” proposed by Donna Haraway, is more exacting, and refers to the geological epoch created by neoliberal corporate globalization, and has the advantage of naming the culprit beyond climate change. It is not native peoples, or impoverished communities, or underdeveloped countries who are subsidizing fossil fuel companies to a degree of $10 million per minute ($5.3 trillion a year) worldwide so that they can run their Capitalocenic enterprises, driving us all toward climate catastrophe.' ///

If we take as a given Eric Schatzberg’s persuasive definition (in his 2018 book, Technology: Critical History of a Concept), that, ‘Technologies express the spirit of an age’, “Capitalocene” unconditionally fails to capture the true terror, devastation and calamitous crises that the double whammy of environmental crises and global heating which, more reflectively, marks this age.

More and more the distinction between seems less and less.

Consider social engineering without borders on the human.

What if the worm is the victorious in all of this?

If we begin to consider the poetics of hacking or behold the cries

of sailors drowned at sea - what if the worm led us there?

All the wood and human structure that rose and bored

is returned to the ocean in the swell of a wave.

Perhaps to see deceives.

More and more the distinction between seems less and less.

Between man and worm. Between woman and machine.

Teredo~~~ | 2016 | Millicent Hawk | text

The installation of Hard/drive, above, was at MinEx on Pentonville Road, London in 2018, which at the time had a level of pollution seven times the maximum EU limit. Yet, at home or in the office, just six air purifying plants are required per person to meet their daily needs for fresh, clean, highly oxygenated air. Damian Carrington, Environment editor at The Guardian, reported, 'Air pollution in London has reached the legal limit for the whole of 2018 less than a month into the year.' And, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, air inside the average home is up to five times more polluted than the air outside, so unless all furniture, paint, carpeting and flooring are organic, eco-friendly and pure, it's most likely there is moderate to substantial off-gassing (caused when synthetic materials or chemicals naturally degrade - releasing harmful particles into the air).

*Plants cultivated at A V A L A N C H E - an artist-run lounge and botanical garden in Peckham - growing, planting and propagating since 2015 ♡ Avalanche was founded by Millicent Hawk O Sansevieria are highly rated by NASA Clean Air Study** as air-purifiers, removing pollutants.and, unlike most plants, releasing oxygen at night. The two additional plants in this installation are Cycas revoluta. Revoluta means "curled back", which is in reference to its leaves. Cycas revoluta are one of the most prehistoric living seed plants on the planet. **NASA's research into plants developed following their need for an efficient, long lasting source of clean air to keep astronauts alive and well during extended space missions.

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