Dialogue in the time of Extraction

The genesis of this project is a consideration of my doctoral research and an in-depth exploration of video, and video art, as a modality for both anthropological investigation and participatory action research. As a part of this process, I wanted to both consider the technical aspects of creating my vision for the research but also interrogate some of the tensions in the employment of this modality.
My overall vision for this project was to present two main ideas, the landscape or the world of Odessa/West Texas and the narratives that interact with this landscape, acting and being acted upon. The landscape portion was meant intended to display the reality of the Odessa landscape, complete with Mesquite bushes, pumpjacks, and urban sprawl, but eventually in the clip, I begin to play around with the idea of a post-oil Odessa or a different future for Odessa. For this purpose, I incorporated concepts of glitch, the capitalocene, and surreality. For the narratives section, I focused mainly on found footage that highlighted different aspects of life in Odessa. The layered videos illustrate the layered (and overwhelming amount of) structural violences and extractions, as well as differing but connected viewpoints . This section incorporated aspects of Steyerl’s ‘poor image’ and by creating a cacophony of perspectives and found sound, I argue that I also incorporated ‘poor sound.’ I also chose to include a couple of quotes in the text, which I used for framing and for dialogue as well. This choice came from a desire to situate academic theory alongside lived and embodied theory, ultimately a research goal of mine.