Press the ignition. Hear the combustion engine. Smell the Gasoline fumes. Feel the improbably smooth and bright coloured plastic surfaces of a vehicle’s interior. Ride. Dream. What do you see?
Petroleum has enabled and shaped modern experience. Beauty and horror lie closely together in the petrol age. With their research collective ‚Beauty of Oil‘, Alexander Klose and Benjamin Steininger trace the deeply ambivalent character of fossil energy and matter through layers of knowledge, politics, arts, ecologies, and everyday lives. Their ‚Atlas of Petromodernity‚ (Santa Barbara 2024, Berlin 2020) maps a panorama of technologies, geographies, histories, and experiences with what is both a chemical energy resource and a cultural drug connected to almost all our epoch’s forms of pleasure and guilt.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Alexander Klose works and lives as a cultural researcher, curator, and publicist in Berlin, Bremen and Halle (Saale) in Germany. He is a research group leader at the European Center for Just Transition Research and Impact-driven Transfer at Martin-Luther-University Halle. He published The Container Principle (MIT, 2015) and curated, among others, On Becoming Earthlings: Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge #18 (Musée de L’Homme, Paris, 2015), Precognitioning Post-Oil NYC (1014, New York, 2021), and Petromelancholia (Brutus, Rotterdam, 2023).
Benjamin Steininger is a cultural and media theorist, historian of science and technology, and a curator working in Berlin (Germany) and Vienna (Austria). He is a postdoctoral fellow at the research cluster “Unifying Systems in Catalysis” at Technische Universität Berlin and at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (Jena). He published Raum-Maschine Reichsautobahn: Zur Dynamik eines bekannt/unbekannten Bauwerks (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2021), and wrote a dissertation on industrial catalysis as a key concept of the 20th century. From 2012 to 2016, he initiated and led a participatory research and collection project on 100 years of oil and gas industry in the Vienna basin, from 2012 to 2022 he was a regular contributor to the “Anthropocene Projects” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin. In 2017, Klose and Steininger founded the collective Beauty of Oil to explore the complexities and contradictions of petromodernity and to conceptualize a Critique of Fossil Reason.
