I thus started off this ethnographic voyage in oil by sticking to a gas station in downtown Ottawa. What came out of this is a meta recording of oil: a recording of its own registration through surveillance screens, cashiers and all kind of electronic devices that make up a control apparatus designed for and through oil consumption. This recording thus aims at capturing the signature of oil in the phonic tracks it leaves in its passing. What you hear is how oil inscribes itself through the daily gestures one makes, which, like any act of faith, work to place one’s trust in what oil can do for us, and does do to us.
You can listen to the recording here: http://humanimalab.org/?p=1053
In this recording, every sound taken individually is meaningless. Meaning goes beyond the acoustic signs and emerge on a mode that is rendered frenetic. The intelligibility conveyed through this recording is an attempt to express some kind of craziness that is the social fiction informing every move and gestures we make, a fiction that is also informed and reactualized in turn through those gestures.
The musicality of the recording is demential, which literally means "separation of the mind", which tries to render sensible the nonsensical. We are here being de- and re-routed all the time. Abducted in the movement of oil, projected through him and under the pressure of a social fiction, there is no time to think or share more than a couple of words. Social interactions are limited to the relief Baby delivers in responding to people's urgent needs: of sugar through chocolate bars, speed with gas, money with scratchcards..
