Description
Book SynopsisEnergy Culture is a provocative book about oil’s firm grip on our politics and everyday lives. It brings together essays and artwork produced in a collaborative environment to stimulate new ways of thinking and to achieve a more just and sustainable world.
The original work collected in Energy Culture creatively engages energy as a social form through lively arguments and artistic research organized around three vectors of inquiry. The first maps how fossil fuels became, and continue to be, embedded in North American society, from the ideology of tar sands reclamation projects to dreams of fiber optic cables running through the Northwest Passage. The second comprises creative and artistic responses to the dominance of fossil fuels in everyday life and to the challenge of realizing new energy cultures. The final section addresses the conceptual and political challenges posed by energy transition and calls into question established views on energy. Its contributions caution against solar capitalism, explore the politics of sabotage, and imagine an energy efficient transportation system called “the switch.” Imbued with a sense of urgency and hope, Energy Culture exposes the deep imbrications of energy and culture while pointing provocatively to ways of thinking and living otherwise.
Trade Review“An exemplary multidisciplinary approach to entangled questions of energy, politics, and aesthetics.
Energy Culture should excite and inspire an interdisciplinary community of scholars, artists, and activists; it not only points to possible ways forward for thinking and acting, but also offers tangible, provocative examples of what our creative and critical practices might do.”- Thomas S. Davis, author of
The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday LifeTable of Contents
- Introduction
- Part I: Mapping Energy Culture
- Oil on Water
- Trespassage
- The Ocean and the Cloud: Material Metaphors of Hidden Infrastructure
- Walking Matters: A Peripatetic Rethinking of Energy Culture
- Several Documents Pertaining to the Cascade Energy (transition) Park Corporation Corporation (CORPCORP)
- Sustaining Petrocultures: On the Politics and Aesthetics of Oil Sands Reclamation
- Part II: Figuring Energy Culture
- Capitalism in the Corpse of a Whale
- Tilting at Windfarms: Towards a Political Ecology of Energy Humanism and the Literary Aesthetic
- Embodied Actants, Fossil Narratives
- The Energy Apparatus
- Aeolian Survey
- Anecdotal Encounters on Driveways: The Aesthetics of Oil in Northern Alberta and Newfoundland
- Energy Meets Telepathy Aesthetics and Materialist Consciousness
- Part III: The Politics of Energy Culture
- Rejecting Solar Capitalism
- The Switch
- Beyond Carbon Democracy: Energy, Infrastructure, and Sabotage
- Strike
- Energized Antagonisms: Thinking Beyond ‘Energy Culture’
- Vortex of Light (Ice Memoriam)
