Sunday, August 6th
September 4, 2026
In this Author's Note, Michael Rubenstein discusses his new book, Pipeline Noir, which revisits Chinatown fifty years after its release, reading the film’s water infrastructure alongside the oil pipelines and energy politics of the 1970s. Moving between Chinatown, The Graduate, Five Easy Pieces, and Mad Max: Fury Road, Rubenstein traces the presence of oil across New Hollywood cinema and argues that Chinatown makes visible a distinctly petromodern way of seeing — what he calls “pipeline noir.”
I.K. Allen asks what happens when universities take fossil fuel money while cutting the humanities. Allen argues that these shifts belong to the same political moment. Oil and gas funding continues to move into universities through research centres, partnerships, STEM programs, and private donations. At the same time, humanities departments are being closed, defunded, and pushed into casual labour. Allen calls this “petro-precarity”: the hollowing out of the fields that help us understand fossil capitalism, climate crisis, racism, gender, labour, and the rise of the far right.
In this thought-in-progress piece, historian Juan Felipe Hernandez Gomez, traces the ecological violence embedded in lithium extraction across two desert sites: Rhyolite Ridge in Nevada and the Salar de Llamara in northern Chile. In the face of the threatened extinction of Tiehm’s buckwheat and the precarity of brine-dependent microbial life, Hernandez Gomez asks what kind of green future is being built when decarbonization depends on new forms of sacrifice.
In this author’s note, Mona Damluji reflects on the archival and personal origins of Pipeline Cinema, her history of oil company filmmaking in Iran and Iraq. Beginning with a mid-century corporate documentary discovered on YouTube, Damluji traces how multinational petroleum companies used film to shape narratives of modernization, progress, and national development. The piece moves from corporate propaganda to family history, confronting the uneasy proximity between critique and complicity
Francesco Gerali reviews Reflecting Oil, edited by Ernst Logar, a volume grounded in a five-year arts-based research project that places crude oil at the center of inquiry. The book treats oil as a substance, a system, and a structuring condition of modern life. Gerali situates the volume within energy humanities and argues that it offers a methodological intervention: artistic research can function as a form of knowledge production capable of reframing how we understand petroculture and transition.
April 7, 2022
March 14, 2022
December 20, 2021
