PETROCULTURES 2024 - OIL CITIES AND POST-OIL CITIES
University of Southern Califronia, May 15-18, 2024
E2. Energy Emergency Repair Kit
Panelists: jessie beier (Concordia), Mark Simpson (U Alberta), Sourayan Mookerjea (U Alberta)
The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation intervention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy; emergency; repair. The E.E.R.K. combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers. Prompted by the urgency of climate change and the injustices of racial-fossil capitalism, it brings together theory and poetics in order to provoke and inspire critical inquiry and creative imagining about what could come next. If energy emergencies loom everywhere, what possibilities for care and repair might they ignite? The panel presentation we propose will introduce some of the key features of the E.E.R.K. as it relates to questions of care and repair at the intersection of energy, infrastructure and urban life. This panel will take the form of a collaborative performance, followed by a Q&A Session, where we, the dedicated E.E.R.K team, will offer some hands-on experience with the E.E.R.K and its non-programmatic, yet highly pragmatic, collection of instructions, diagrams, and spells. In more specific terms, this (sometimes interactive) presentation will move through ways of getting to know your energy emergency before tuning in to mycelial networks in order to rethink how petro-infrastructures might be resituated in relation to the subtractive logics afforded by experimental practices of decompoesis. It will then outline some non-standard operating procedures (NSOPs) and conclude with selected exercises in ritual maintenance.
D2. Panel: Necropetroculture and its Hauntings
jessie beier (Concordia) & Mark Simpson (U Alberta) - “Energy Mediacy”
This paper theorizes energy mediacy against familiar ideas of energy literacy and energy transition. Focusing on the weirdly contradictory capacities of blockchain, a notable energy infrastructure today, we examine the normative il/logics of energy transition and energy literacy to consider how energy mediacy as a subtractive mode might provide different coordinates for thinking and doing. At stake is a desire to reframe the temporal ambit of speculation as a practice that unfixes futurity, serving not to predict some better energy future but to fold energy-to-come, as an unknown yet urgent problem, into the here and now.
