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.
Wow! Hard to believe that’s produced by Shell. A outside of any environmental or idealogical perspective, I found it deeply unsettling just on a visual and auditory level.
There is a documentary about a concert at the bottom of the sea, really way down in the 'basement' of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_A_platform which is 303 meters under the water surface:
It's about an hour long, mostly showing the preparation of the singer, and the crew, like security/emergency training, to be even allowed to get on, and then down there. Thereby showing how it is out there. Interesting. One can omit the last half hour, or so, if uninterested in the music, or skip around that.
>with visuals that would feel much more at home in a climate shock video nowadays
That's likely because there's huge overlap between "climate shock video" and "video from decades past when big industry was visibly polluting things in the west" and "video filtered to look like it is from decades past". Basically you're pattern matching on the second order visual cues. A video of a pit mine full of modern equipment taken with a modern camera in 1080p or better wouldn't look the same so you wouldn't mentally bucket it the same way.
If this piqued anyone's interest in oil/gas rigs, an engineering disasters podcast I like ("Well, there's your problem") covered a couple of North Sea rig catastrophes in detail that may interest you:
Just as a quick content warning: engineering disasters involving loss of life are not exactly a jolly affair, but the Byford Dolphin ep has a few grisly details that make it unsuitable for the faint of heart.
edit: Just thought I should clarify why this popped into my head because it might seem a little morbid otherwise. I'm from the North East of Scotland where there have been a few of these disasters that hit the headlines, and my dad and plenty of friends worked in oil. This meant I got a lot of exposure to this, so "oil rig" is connected with "disaster" in my head, and now decades later finding out why these things happened was fascinating.
IMHO 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.
When I was a kid I loved (who am I kidding, I still love them) the Incredible Cross-Sections books which have exploded-view drawings of tons of machines, real and fictional. The oil rig in particular sticks out in my mind because that’s how I learned they were movable and had their own engines. Seeing all the different parts and what they were for was fascinating.
Don't know why you're being downvoted, it's obvious you are right. "AI art" is a style transfer and NLP tool. It doesn't exactly produce visual work with meaning, other than by accident.
They of course can ---- if you know about this kind of thing in the first place. I don't really think AI can actually create new stuff -- best they can do is random sampling in some clusters, or going total cliched random, like what happens when you ask GPT to complete a <|endoftext|> token.
Oh 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.
When 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 Tripods.
--
1. See how I casually worked that in like I ride it every week. :P
What used to happen--and I assume still does--is that during periods of slack demand some older rigs will get decommissioned but serviceable rigs that just didn't have work for them at the moment would get "stacked" with some minimal skeleton crew for maintenance. In Texas, Sabine Pass was a common spot to stack rigs.
if you've never seen the refineries on the US Gulf Coast it's worth a road trip. Super surreal, miles and miles of dense piping and machinery. I don't really have words to describe except it's something you'd expect to see in a sci-fi anime and not in real life. Just these massive complexes as big as small cities in a web of pipes of all sizes going in all directions.
edit: they remind me of the scene in Aliens toward the end when Ripley is standing on the platform waiting for Bishop to pick her up. Minus the fire and explosions though ( well usually heh ).
Back in the early 2000s I was debugging obscene memory usage for our GPS navigation application for symbian phones, and that was the exact route I used to debug it!
As an aside, deep sea oil drilling and production platforms are incredible put-a-man-on-the-moon engineering feats. If oil weren't politically unpopular, the engineering behind these would be celebrated and admired.
At 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.)
I 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.
The 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.
I agree. When I first landed from the link, I thought, "Where's the beauty?"
As I scrolled, like you, I found I was becoming impressed with the diversity. (Norway seems to be trying to win some kind of prize that has not been created yet.)
More scrolling and I'm thinking, "I would love to 3D model these and resin-print kits so that you can build them, paint them and (?)... display them off the coast of your model railroad."
I think you hit on something with "arbitrary choices"...
There is a kind of "design" that is devoid of design. I had this realization 50 years ago when I first tried to rebuild a carburetor and had left it on the dining room table — when I returned home to find the indeterminately-shaped thing in an environment flush with design I was struck by the utilitarian of its design. Every facet, hole, angle there serving only the utility of the part, likely cost savings and ease of manufacturing being the guiding principle, not aesthetics at all.
Likewise, these bizarre oil rigs look like the fever dream of an overworked architectural engineer. Kowloon Walled City vibes....
At a local coffee shop they had paintings for sale of stormy ocean scenes with oil rigs in the mist. I still regret not buying one (it was pretty reasonably priced)
Scrolling through these made me remember that some years ago Katie Melua played a concert on the bottom of the "feet" of Troll A platform (number 4 of the list). Apparently world record for the deepest concert. Absolutely mind blowing scale.
Working in the oil field in remote parts of the Arctic was decidedly the closest to living on a space colony that I’ll ever get and it was awesome. I miss that environment and the work very much.
Could you give us a bit of what it was like? I imagine it being somewhat like the Vegas hotels where you can spend an entire vacation without actually having to step outside or a military/cruise ship that has stores/entertainment/exercise facilities built right in.
Nice! I worked on some larger offshore drilling rigs / platforms like those myself. It's a little surreal sometimes spending your days around so much massive machinery.
When opening, I expected to see something about harsh conditions of life there etc etc, but those are only pictures of rigs. I don't see anything distopian there, only utilitarian.
One of things that I recently learned is that many of rigs are actually floating structures. Kind of didn't expect that.
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
I do think these structures are beautiful. They seem organic and mechanical at the same time. It looks like something that has been constructed to withstand nature in an incredibly contrasted way. It conjures the same amazement I have with large planes taking off, it looks like it shouldn’t work, but it does. I can understand why people don’t find it interesting, but I for one am mesmerized by it.
I think it was in the documentary Crumb where they explained how R. Crumb lovingly filled in random urban junk in the landscape, like TV antennas, power lines, traffic lights, and all sorts of clutter that many artists would elide from an attractive panorama. And yet Crumb found it somehow beautiful in this random jumbled-up morass of artificial trees. I found it admirable.
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.
[+] [-] weast|2 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/_zWjT59S_wk
[+] [-] stef25|2 years ago|reply
If you're in to that kind of stuff check out Koyaanisqatsi & Powaqqatsi
[+] [-] formerly_proven|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justusthane|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LargoLasskhyfv|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YtCHHpZNxo
It's about an hour long, mostly showing the preparation of the singer, and the crew, like security/emergency training, to be even allowed to get on, and then down there. Thereby showing how it is out there. Interesting. One can omit the last half hour, or so, if uninterested in the music, or skip around that.
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|2 years ago|reply
Maybe it's just because of There Will Be Blood.
[+] [-] dtagames|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjbwork|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|2 years ago|reply
That's likely because there's huge overlap between "climate shock video" and "video from decades past when big industry was visibly polluting things in the west" and "video filtered to look like it is from decades past". Basically you're pattern matching on the second order visual cues. A video of a pit mine full of modern equipment taken with a modern camera in 1080p or better wouldn't look the same so you wouldn't mentally bucket it the same way.
[+] [-] smcl|2 years ago|reply
- Piper Alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVaMNHQQCs0
- Byford Dolphin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azThd0R7Bt0
Just as a quick content warning: engineering disasters involving loss of life are not exactly a jolly affair, but the Byford Dolphin ep has a few grisly details that make it unsuitable for the faint of heart.
edit: Just thought I should clarify why this popped into my head because it might seem a little morbid otherwise. I'm from the North East of Scotland where there have been a few of these disasters that hit the headlines, and my dad and plenty of friends worked in oil. This meant I got a lot of exposure to this, so "oil rig" is connected with "disaster" in my head, and now decades later finding out why these things happened was fascinating.
[+] [-] mrtksn|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thedanbob|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon3242|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilyt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bippingchip|2 years ago|reply
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.
[1] https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/becher#
[+] [-] Lio|2 years ago|reply
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 Tripods.
--
1. See how I casually worked that in like I ride it every week. :P
[+] [-] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|2 years ago|reply
edit: they remind me of the scene in Aliens toward the end when Ripley is standing on the platform waiting for Bishop to pick her up. Minus the fire and explosions though ( well usually heh ).
[+] [-] silisevic|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timdellinger|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamthemonster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mauvehaus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkl95|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3zra|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mLuby|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maCDzP|2 years ago|reply
We zig zagged between oil rigs.
I felt like I was starring in Water World, The Pirates of the Carabeean and The Goonies all at once.
It was awesome.
[+] [-] renewiltord|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mLuby|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasjb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorjusborg|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|2 years ago|reply
As I scrolled, like you, I found I was becoming impressed with the diversity. (Norway seems to be trying to win some kind of prize that has not been created yet.)
More scrolling and I'm thinking, "I would love to 3D model these and resin-print kits so that you can build them, paint them and (?)... display them off the coast of your model railroad."
I think you hit on something with "arbitrary choices"...
There is a kind of "design" that is devoid of design. I had this realization 50 years ago when I first tried to rebuild a carburetor and had left it on the dining room table — when I returned home to find the indeterminately-shaped thing in an environment flush with design I was struck by the utilitarian of its design. Every facet, hole, angle there serving only the utility of the part, likely cost savings and ease of manufacturing being the guiding principle, not aesthetics at all.
Likewise, these bizarre oil rigs look like the fever dream of an overworked architectural engineer. Kowloon Walled City vibes....
[+] [-] moffkalast|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inasio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derda|2 years ago|reply
Press release: https://www.equinor.com/news/archive/2006/10/02/WorldsDeepes...
Documentary Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YtCHHpZNxo
[+] [-] piloto_ciego|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muttled|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ufmace|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galkk|2 years ago|reply
One of things that I recently learned is that many of rigs are actually floating structures. Kind of didn't expect that.
[+] [-] bradwood|2 years ago|reply
Source: http://www.theshippinglawblog.com/2018/08/what-is-difference...
[+] [-] redder23|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __void|2 years ago|reply
...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
[+] [-] winkelwagen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amne|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CrampusDestrus|2 years ago|reply
the first pic is probably the best photo, but the other platforms have their unique beauty even if the pics are not on par