The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UC-SB is presenting a series of fantastic events this year on the theme Oil+Water. With this event they turn to their own backyard: the case of Southern California. Oil + Water commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Santa Barbara oil spill, and provides an opportunity to examine the impact of these two resources on the history, economy, and culture of California and the world. Interested parties should contact our program and events coordinator, Laura Devendorf (ldevendorf[at]ihc.ucsb.edu), for more information. Below is a schedule of events and activities for the conference.

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Oil + Water: The Case of Santa Barbara and Southern California
April 8 – 10, 2010
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
UC Santa Barbara / Santa Barbara, CA, USA

This conference will explore the ways in which oil and water have created and transformed the history and culture of Santa Barbara and Southern California. Topics will include the Santa Barbara oil spill; the impact of oil on Hollywood; agriculture and marine life; the Owens River Valley; the Salton Sea; cars and car culture; and environmental histories and their lessons.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Oil + Water series, the UC California Studies Consortium, and the Community Environmental Council.

Thursday, April 8
5:00 PM KEYNOTE: Oil Runs Through It: Power, Publics, and the Role of Place
Harvey Molotch (Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU)

Friday, April 9
9:00 AM Introduction
Ann Bermingham (Acting Director, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UCSB)

9:15 AM PANEL: Oil, Water, and Activism: The Case of Santa Barbara
Teresa Sabol Spezio (History, UCD) / Most Congressmen Care Little: The Role of the Santa Barbara Oil Spill in Changing Federal Environmental Laws
Eric Smith (Political Science, UCSB) / What the California Public Thinks About Off Shore Oil Development
Linda Krop (Chief Council, Environmental Defense Center and Environmental Studies, UCSB) / The Environmental Politics of Off Shore Drilling

11:00 AM KEYNOTE: Whales, Noisemakers, and Noise
Jim Nollman

1:30 PM PANEL: Oil+Water: the Case of Southern California
David Maisel / The Lake Project
Mason White & Lola Sheppard / Farming the Salton Sea
Andrew Fitzpatrick / Ocotillo Wells: California Oil History Encapsulated
Kenneth Rogers, Caleb Waldrof and Bill Kelley, Jr. (Third Rail Group, UCSD) / Slow Activism, Dialogical Practice and Environmental Remediation at the Inglewood Oil Fields

3:00 PM KEYNOTE: After Oil!: Petroleum, Media, and the California Experiment
Stephanie LeMenager (English, UCSB)

4:00 PM PANEL: The Culture of Oil
Vanessa Osborne (English, USC) / Celluloid and Oil: Early Hollywood and the Oil Industry in Upton Sinclair’s Oil!
Jean-Paul deGuzman (History, UCLA) / At the Car Wash! Culture and Labor in the City of Angles
Desiree D’Alessandro and Diran Lyons (Art, UCSB) / World Water Shortage vs Golf Consumption and Jake Gyllenhaal Challenges the Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

Saturday, April 10
9:15 AM ROUNDTABLE: Oil and Water in the Santa Barbara County Agrifood System
David A. Cleveland (Environmental Studies, UCSB)
With: Ingrid R. Avison, Caitlin Brimm, Heidi Diaz, Sydney E. Hollingshead, Dominique C. Liuzzi, Nora M. Muller, Corie N. Radka, Tyler D. Watson, Hannah Wright.

10:45 AM KEYNOTE: Near Goleta But Closer: An Unnatural History
Harry Reese (Art, UCSB)

1:30 PM PANEL: Histories of an Unnatural History
Karen Piper (Comparative Literature, Carnegie Mellon University) / Owens Lake: California’s Albatross
Eliza Martin (History, UCSC) / Making Rain, Creating Floods: Expertise and the Manufacturing of Disaster in San Diego’s Flood of 1916
David Zetland, (Agriculture and Resource Economics, UCB) / Joseph Jensen and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
Michael R. Adamson (History, CSU Sacramento) / Oil Booms and Boosterism: Local Elites, Outside Companies, and the Growth of Ventura California

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Hope to see some of you there.

[Ed note: this work was produced in the Frozen Cities Liquid Networks studio.]

At 162,000 km (including the Arctic Archipelago), Canada is the country with the longest Arctic shoreline – ahead of its compatriots Russia, Norway, Greenland/Denmark, and the USA.  Arctic Nations have been racing to chart their respective under-water continental shelves, in order to claim the abundance of natural resources which lie beneath the sea bed.

Yet Canada has never been a nation known for its military might. Indeed at the moment, Canada has five icebreakers that guide foreign vessels through Canada’s Arctic waters and assist in harbour breakouts, routing, and northern resupply, but ironically, none that can operate all season. And the Canadian Forces Northern Area (CFNA), headquartered in Yellowknife, consists of 65 personnel, responsible for defending 4 million km2 of unforgiving territory.

Meanwhile, the Russians have been theatrically (and quite literally) planting flags in the arctic sea floor– claiming it as theirs. The CBC has a great documentary covering this arctic race.

[Unpacking the logistics of millitary control and oil extraction]

Aumanil, by Dan McTavish and Kevin Lisoy, of the University of Waterloo, takes as its premise that Canada needs to assert its military presence within the North West passage, for strategic and monitoring purposes. Yet the project also works under the assumption that Canada is unlikely to liberate the funds required for such an outpost anytime soon.

Aumanil opportunistically envisages the Canadian government  leveraging oil companies to create a new hybrid oil rig / military base.

[Aumanil: at the confluence of oil resources and global trade routes]

Lisoy and McTavish write: “the siting of Aumanil facilitates the direct collection, transfer, refinement and storage of crude oil extracted from the largest projected oil reserve in the North. The site also facilitates the active management, control and assertion of sovereignty by Canada of the resources and routes of the North.”

A permanently moored city replete with social, military and port infrastructure, Aumanil envisages a new Arctic settlement or Port-City, that shifts its programmatic weight from oil extraction and refining in its early phases, to military and port intensive use in a post-peak oil scenario.

Rig components

[Re-rig: from oil extraction to millitary port-city]

The project takes the basic components of the oil rig and reconfigures them to allow future flexibility, allowing Aumanil to remain economically viable. “As the oil functions leave the modules public amenities are introduced into the system. Food production, water desalination, energy management and collection become the new processes of the rig.

[From oil storage to green energy]

Both the industrial and social qualities of the rig have the capacity to change with external influences (Oil exploration, depletion of specific resources, the opening of the Northwest Passage), but as well with changing internal conditions ( ie. inclusion of families on the rig and a shift from temporal occupancy to more permanent habitation).

[Co-habitation: oil production and living units]

[Accommodations are modular so internal configurations may be reworked as social conditions change]

Lisoy and McTavish write: “Aumanil is an infrastructure in the macro and micro sense. The project is a projection screen, making legible the changing landscape of Canadian sovereignty, resource extraction and dwelling in the Canadian North.”

[Oil rig as Banhamian mega-structure]

Canada will surely need to partner with a global power to maintain some semblance of sovereignty in the Canadian North. A likely candidate is the United States, but in an era of sky-rocketing national debts and increased Public-Private Partnerships, military and oil companies might not make such strange bed-fellows.

This work was completed in the InfraNet Lab run studio Frozen Cities Liquid Networks at the University of Waterloo. (All images, unless otherwise noted, are by Dan McTavish and Kevin Lisoy.)

[Barents region developing industries.]

[Map showing inhabtants within reach of a new northern IKEA in Torino and Haparanda.]

The project encompasses a range of issues, opportunities, and dilemmas facing many cities and towns in this region that has become a resource extraction hotbed as well as strategic staging point for resource trade. Take for example the city of Hammerfest, Norway, which is no longer in decline because of the 19 million euros it earns in tax income from the massive StatoilHydro LNG plant at Melkoya. And then there are unique economic anomalies such as the merger of Torino in Finland and Haparanda in Sweden.

Though probably no other region has gone and will be going through as dramatic a transformation as northern Russia. The change is accelerated by post-communist market shifts, political jockeying, environmental change, and the oil and gas race. Places such as Kirovsk, Monchegorsk, and Nikel have seen these changes at different times throughout various regimes. Murmansk is the largest city inside the arctic circle with a population of about 350,000, and maintains the largest port in the region. The port currently processes fish, coal, and phosphate, though its position relative to the recently activated Shtokman gas field is sure to generate even more significant transformations.

[Traits of Murmansk, Russia.]

The book includes projects by BuroMoscow, NORD, Testbedstudio, Department of Urban Design and Planning, NTNU, and 0047. It is directed by 0047 in collaboration with the Barents Triennale and Pikene pa broen.

Big thanks to Kelly Doran for the lead on this.

If you are within earshot of New York sometime before the remainder of the year, do not miss Keller Easterling's "Some True Stories: researches in the field of flexible truth." It runs from Nov 18 – Dec 23 2008 at the always reliable Storefront for Art and Architecture. Easterling and her collaborators chart the convenience of deviance, highlighting the lure of swimming in the dirty waters of political persuasions.

Immediately, I am reminded of the current piracy off the Somalian coast as a reminder of some of the by-products of these flexible truths. The recent hijacking of an oil tanker from Saudi Arabia's state-owned shipping line, Vela International Marine Ltd, that is carrying more than 2 million barrels of crude valued at $110 million is a reminder of the power of pirate polity. There have been some 70 pirate attacks in and around the Gulf of Aden so far this year. Of course there really is no government in Somalia right now, so pirating seems like a great option. Aaargh…

[Saudi Arabia's oil tanker Sirius Star was the largest hijacking in history.]

The pirate minefield off the Somalian coast.

Ed's note: Although discovered after the fact, BLDGBLOG and the Lab were in the same headspace yesterday… they have a fantastic overview of piracy, live(!).