25 ms·
The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- 3zra 3y agoHighly recommend this related short story by China Miéville: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/22/china-mieville-covehithe-short-story https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/22/china-mieville...
- redder23 3y agoI find only the very first pic somehow appealing. I do not really see any "beauty" there.
- amne 3y agoFor me number 5, Draugen, is mesmerizing. I don't know the population of such a platform but seeing it from far way supported by a single pillar gives me anxiety.
- Arnt 3y agoOh, why? That pillar isn't even 300m ;) There were three shifts of 43 people there many years ago, I expect the number will have changed a little since.
- __void 3y agoI don't think there is a word to express the melancholic fascination with megastructures, but I certainly suffer from it: ...the intricate patterns of stairs, windows, pergolas and cables, the chaotic and seemingly random arrangement of supports, the organic tumefying rust that de-patterns the otherwise perfect recursiveness... it is the same feeling that makes one appreciate kowloon walled city and Tsutomu Nihei's superb early works, to give two examples
- matwood 3y agoSame for me with large airports. There's just something about the scale that is fascinating.
- redder23 3y agoWell I kind of get it when people say it, for me personally I do only see it in the very 1st pic a little. And dystopian, not at all. There are SO MANY crazy dystopian things out there. An oil rig, for me, has nothing dystopian at all.
- overthemoon 3y ago"Melancholic" is the right word. Like negative romance. It has a peculiar ugliness that makes me want to stare at it, to get lost in the detail, and the contrast against the relative uniformity of the water is really compelling as a photograph. There's also an element of awe at its engineering, at least for me. Growing up, my dad worked at a nuclear plant, and it inspired a similar sense of awe. It's an aesthetic that's been used in a lot of science fiction. Contrast against this famous photo: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-24/why-the-internet-loves-this-pennsylvania-rest-stop https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-24/why-the-i... which I find disgusting, though similarly detailed. Maybe it's just the whole "familiarity breeds contempt" thing.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI think it was in the documentary Crumb where they explained how R. Crumb lovingly filled in random urban junk in the landscape, like TV antennas, power lines, traffic lights, and all sorts of clutter that many artists would elide from an attractive panorama. And yet Crumb found it somehow beautiful in this random jumbled-up morass of artificial trees. I found it admirable.
- CrampusDestrus 3y agoI think you are conflating the quality of the photo with the quality of the subject the first pic is probably the best photo, but the other platforms have their unique beauty even if the pics are not on par
- winkelwagen 3y agoI do think these structures are beautiful. They seem organic and mechanical at the same time. It looks like something that has been constructed to withstand nature in an incredibly contrasted way. It conjures the same amazement I have with large planes taking off, it looks like it shouldn’t work, but it does. I can understand why people don’t find it interesting, but I for one am mesmerized by it.
- thomasjb 3y agohttps://nitter.net/FedeItaliano76/status/1650871570137600000 https://nitter.net/FedeItaliano76/status/1650871570137600000
- ghaff 3y agoAt the risk of being pedantic, all the ones I saw are production platforms. Oil rigs/drilling rigs more typically refer to mobile exploratory drilling rigs. (Though colloquially "oil rigs" is widely used.)
- iamthemonster 3y agoI think outside of the industry people just say "oil rigs" for everything from semi-subs to FPSOs to TLPs to monopods to GBSs to jackets.
- ghaff 3y agoI'm sure that's fair. I was in the offshore drilling industry for a few years so I'm more aware of the nuances (at least on the exploratory drilling side) than most.
- loa_in_ 3y agoYup. It's a rig. It can search or reach for oil among other things. That said, what does exploratory mean in this context?
- ghaff 3y agoIt means you're drilling a hole and dropping sensors down it to get a better idea of whether a particular location would be profitable to extract oil/gas from. Production platforms are semi-permanent structures that do the extracting once oil/gas have been found. (My knowledge of the field is pretty old but AFAIK, things still work pretty much the same way--although I assume seismic tools locate oil/gas reservoirs without drilling have gotten a lot better.)
- mauvehaus 3y agoAs for me, I'm not clear at all what this has to do with redox reactions and stoichiometry? Oxidation Is Loss - Reduction Is Gain.
- mrtksn 3y agoIMHO This type of beauty is something the "AI" image generators do far failed to reproduce. Sure, they are great at creating "out of this world" images but the beauty of those structures comes from our ability to reason about the features. When you look at these structures, you immediately begin thinking about what is this and why it is there and how would the life on it feel. It has logical cohesion.
- anon3242 3y agoThey of course can ---- if you know about this kind of thing in the first place. I don't really think AI can actually create new stuff -- best they can do is random sampling in some clusters, or going total cliched random, like what happens when you ask GPT to complete a <|endoftext|> token.
- andrepd 3y agoDon't know why you're being downvoted, it's obvious you are right. "AI art" is a style transfer and NLP tool. It doesn't exactly produce visual work with meaning, other than by accident.
- mrtksn 3y agoI think it's similar thing with hands, we immediately see the problem with the hands because we know how they work and recognise when the generated hands wouldn't work. This expands to all kind of machinery actually. The moment you start reasoning about the output it falls apart. I only assume at some point there would be another AI model which is trained on how things work and will guide the current AI stuff. Like the way ControlNet guides StableDiffusion to produce output the way the user desires.
- GuB-42 3y agoIt also happens with human artists. Artists are trained in things like perspective, shadows, etc... They often devote a good amount of time drawing people right maybe, study basic principles like mass distribution, but they don't know everything about the underlying principles. For example, I have a painting of a harbor with a few sailboats, it looks great until you realize that sails take the wind from different directions, as if each boat had their own wind. Unless the artist really has a strong focus on realism, sometimes involving collaboration with experts in the field of what they are drawing, you are going to find mistakes like these everywhere.
- foreverobama 3y ago[dead]
- Reason077 3y agoIf a hostile alien species ever arrives to kill/enslave humanity and plunder all Earth’s resources, I wonder if their harvesters will look something like this? Or will they put more effort into aesthetics?
- dotancohen 3y agoThat's beauty? Surely something must be lodged in the eye of whatever beholder wrote that. These blocks of rust look far more Borg than Begonia.
- bwesz 3y agoIt says "dystopian beauty". A begonia is not dystopian beauty.
- dotancohen 3y agoI've read most good - and much bad - dystopian fiction. I am very familiar with the word. Modifying the word "beauty" with it does not make a word combination fitting for these ugly structures by any reasonable stretch of either words' meaning.
- osigurdson 3y agoAh but the Buddha exists in all things (ZAMM).
- ilyt 3y agoeven pedophiles ? I don't like that buddha guy
- timdellinger 3y agoAs an aside, deep sea oil drilling and production platforms are incredible put-a-man-on-the-moon engineering feats. If oil weren't politically unpopular, the engineering behind these would be celebrated and admired.
- atorodius 3y agoAny references to look into? Sounds cool.
- egil 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condeep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condeep
- baud147258 3y agoI mean my brother is working in a company that's building oil drilling and refining equipment and had made a few periods on off-shore vessels and he always has a few interesting stories to tell
- gorjusborg 3y agoI agree it is beautiful, but in a strange way. Most construction results in familiar forms. Arbitrary choices are few because the problem has been sufficiently solved. I am floored by the diversity in the forms here. I am not all that thrilled with the aesthetic by itself.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI agree. When I first landed from the link, I thought, "Where's the beauty?" As I scrolled, like you, I found I was becoming impressed with the diversity. (Norway seems to be trying to win some kind of prize that has not been created yet.) More scrolling and I'm thinking, "I would love to 3D model these and resin-print kits so that you can build them, paint them and (?)... display them off the coast of your model railroad." I think you hit on something with "arbitrary choices"... There is a kind of "design" that is devoid of design. I had this realization 50 years ago when I first tried to rebuild a carburetor and had left it on the dining room table — when I returned home to find the indeterminately-shaped thing in an environment flush with design I was struck by the utilitarian of its design. Every facet, hole, angle there serving only the utility of the part, likely cost savings and ease of manufacturing being the guiding principle, not aesthetics at all. Likewise, these bizarre oil rigs look like the fever dream of an overworked architectural engineer. Kowloon Walled City vibes....
- HPsquared 3y agoLike the Kowloon city, the form of these objects was evolved out of necessity, step by step. One requirement after another.
- moffkalast 3y agoThey look roughly like one would imagine Vogon spaceships to.
- smcl 3y agoIf this piqued anyone's interest in oil/gas rigs, an engineering disasters podcast I like ("Well, there's your problem") covered a couple of North Sea rig catastrophes in detail that may interest you: - Piper Alpha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVaMNHQQCs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVaMNHQQCs0 - Byford Dolphin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azThd0R7Bt0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azThd0R7Bt0 Just as a quick content warning: engineering disasters involving loss of life are not exactly a jolly affair, but the Byford Dolphin ep has a few grisly details that make it unsuitable for the faint of heart. edit: Just thought I should clarify why this popped into my head because it might seem a little morbid otherwise. I'm from the North East of Scotland where there have been a few of these disasters that hit the headlines, and my dad and plenty of friends worked in oil. This meant I got a lot of exposure to this, so "oil rig" is connected with "disaster" in my head, and now decades later finding out why these things happened was fascinating.
- Lio 3y agoWhen I rode from John o' Groats to Land's End[1] I remember riding past a firth on the east coast of Scotland with a load of oil rigs ready for either refitting or decommissioning. It was crazy surreal. The landscape is an amazing backdrop anyway but these things are just so big, so weird looking and so out of place... it felt like being party to an alien invasion. It made me think of the John Christopher classic The Tripods. -- 1. See how I casually worked that in like I ride it every week. :P
- oh_sigh 3y agoBack in the early 2000s I was debugging obscene memory usage for our GPS navigation application for symbian phones, and that was the exact route I used to debug it!
- ghaff 3y agoWhat used to happen--and I assume still does--is that during periods of slack demand some older rigs will get decommissioned but serviceable rigs that just didn't have work for them at the moment would get "stacked" with some minimal skeleton crew for maintenance. In Texas, Sabine Pass was a common spot to stack rigs.
- silisevic 3y agoI believe you've probably seen these in Cromarty Firth, featured in this Tim Traveller's YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSOaHpydv8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSOaHpydv8
- Lio 3y agoI think you could be right!
- chasd00 3y agoif you've never seen the refineries on the US Gulf Coast it's worth a road trip. Super surreal, miles and miles of dense piping and machinery. I don't really have words to describe except it's something you'd expect to see in a sci-fi anime and not in real life. Just these massive complexes as big as small cities in a web of pipes of all sizes going in all directions. edit: they remind me of the scene in Aliens toward the end when Ripley is standing on the platform waiting for Bishop to pick her up. Minus the fire and explosions though ( well usually heh ).
- weast 3y agoOne of my favourite videos is a striking self-promo clip commissioned by Shell in 1970s. The tech optimism is strong, with visuals that would feel much more at home in a climate shock video nowadays. the video captures the otherworldliness of oil production and large scale infrastructure in a hypnotic way. It really is quite beautiful. https://youtu.be/_zWjT59S_wk https://youtu.be/_zWjT59S_wk
- LargoLasskhyfv 3y agoThere is a documentary about a concert at the bottom of the sea, really way down in the 'basement' of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_A_platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_A_platform which is 303 meters under the water surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YtCHHpZNxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YtCHHpZNxo It's about an hour long, mostly showing the preparation of the singer, and the crew, like security/emergency training, to be even allowed to get on, and then down there. Thereby showing how it is out there. Interesting. One can omit the last half hour, or so, if uninterested in the music, or skip around that.
- dsfyu404ed 3y ago>with visuals that would feel much more at home in a climate shock video nowadays That's likely because there's huge overlap between "climate shock video" and "video from decades past when big industry was visibly polluting things in the west" and "video filtered to look like it is from decades past". Basically you're pattern matching on the second order visual cues. A video of a pit mine full of modern equipment taken with a modern camera in 1080p or better wouldn't look the same so you wouldn't mentally bucket it the same way.
- weast 3y agoI think what I like so much about the aesthetic is that it its age allows me to quickly forget the second order effects of industrialization and quickly, quietly appreciate the sheer magnificence of these extraction cathedrals, the total celebration of our ability to harness nature, to defy the balance of the world in our favour. If my suspention of disbelief is paused for a minute, i recollect the opening scenes of Dr. Strangelove, where the refuelling of the bomber planes looks more like a avian pairing ritual than a technocratic feat of usurping the laws of nature. A few scenes in the shell video definitely have a phallic quality to it (like the drill bit penetrating the water, the pipes laid across the forest floor), and I even felt a moment of self referential criticism as the camera panned across the bleak oilfield in the middle of the ocean expanse. I think I disagree on the point about the "medium is the message" framing. I dont think the camera quality has much to do with it, instead the visual qualities arise from the lack of a need to show that critical view, as the blank optimism overshadowed the less savory views by a mile. I think we have lost the capacity to view these process neutrally, independently of the medium used to record them. I remember watching a hungarian film called On body and soul, which takes place in a meat processing facility. The footage of the meat processing is beautiful, eerily so, and it is really jaunting when you realize the only images of slaughterhouses you have seen is grainy handycam footage filmed for ideological purposes. The medium is always important, but always subservient to the gaze. I found the video eons ago, it still has so few views and I am so happy to have brought it to light to such a receptive crowd.
- mkl95 3y agoI have always found beauty in machinery and the like, probably because I grew up in a city with a romanticized industrial past. I find this kind of stuff especially beautiful since I began playing Factorio.
- golergka 3y agoIf a man doesn't find modern machinery beautiful and inspiring then he really doesn't understand human condition for the most of human history. These machines brought us from poverty and misery unimaginable today.
- mkl95 3y ago> These machines brought us from poverty and misery unimaginable today. This has to be it. My ancestors quality of life skyrocketed somewhere in the early to mid 20th century. Before that, they were mostly peasants and journeymen, for hundreds if not thousands of years. Ironically, machines gave millions of people the chance to express their humanity, mostly via social mobility and rights we now take for granted.
- mLuby 3y agoThe Rig (2023) is a mysterious miniseries set entirely on an oil rig off Scotland. It feels like they're on a spaceship, isolated from terra firma and the rest of humanity. Starring Ser Jorah Mormont from GoT and Stevie Budd from Schitt's Creek.
- bippingchip 3y agoOh these are nice. They are the modern equivalent, in a way, of the industrial photos of Bernd and Hill Becher [1], who with and archivist's diligence sought out, cataloged and captured industrial sites (often now long decommissioned and disappeared). It captures a picture of an era gone or disappearing. If you have the chance: check out on of their exhibitions. I saw it back in December in SFMOMA. It's a special and humbling experience to see wall after wall full of all kinds of variations on the same industrial theme, like water towers. (almost like they were generated by a NN, and the Bechers just played with temperature, prompts to create variations...) You could say the same of these oil rigs: Massive feats of human engineering and ingenuity, worth capturing for eternity, as over time many of them might disappear or will be replaced. [1] https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/becher# https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/becher#
- derda 3y agoScrolling through these made me remember that some years ago Katie Melua played a concert on the bottom of the "feet" of Troll A platform (number 4 of the list). Apparently world record for the deepest concert. Absolutely mind blowing scale. Press release: https://www.equinor.com/news/archive/2006/10/02/WorldsDeepestConcertOnTrollA https://www.equinor.com/news/archive/2006/10/02/WorldsDeepes... Documentary Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YtCHHpZNxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YtCHHpZNxo
- readingnews 3y agoI find it interesting that they pick a tiny platform out in the Gulf of Mexico, but show enormous structures from the North Sea. There are giant platforms out in the Gulf also. Thousands of smaller ones, and some drilling rigs too.
- 11235813213455 3y agopoor wind factor
- aroc 3y agoI find myself strangely drawn to dystopian aesthetic. There’s something deeply moving about them.
- mrlonglong 3y agoWe don't dig up our dead. Why are we digging up and burning dead animals and plants?
- bradwood 3y agoI think you'll find these are (mostly) oil _platforms_ not oil rigs. Source: http://www.theshippinglawblog.com/2018/08/what-is-difference-between-oil-rig-and.html?m=1 http://www.theshippinglawblog.com/2018/08/what-is-difference...
- reidjs 3y agoYes these are unintentionally beautiful yet windfarms are a complete eyesore (sarcasm)
- kmeisthax 3y agoTwitter being Twitter, there's a bluecheck fossil-fuel lover account in the replies trying to propagandize for this not being dystopian: https://twitter.com/AllthingsLNG/status/1651223136644259840 https://twitter.com/AllthingsLNG/status/1651223136644259840
- pphysch 3y agoThat comment seems pretty reasonable. Would it be better if they didn't and have a O&G related name?
- piloto_ciego 3y agoWorking in the oil field in remote parts of the Arctic was decidedly the closest to living on a space colony that I’ll ever get and it was awesome. I miss that environment and the work very much.
- muttled 3y agoCould you give us a bit of what it was like? I imagine it being somewhat like the Vegas hotels where you can spend an entire vacation without actually having to step outside or a military/cruise ship that has stores/entertainment/exercise facilities built right in.
- piloto_ciego 3y agoFor me (I was still a pilot at the time), the camp I lived in was a bit like a more professional version of a belter colony from the Expanse with the exterior vibe of The Thing (without the aliens). Very industrial? And going outside was akin to going through and airlock and putting a spacesuit on. The bedrooms were spartan but comfy, the internet was tolerably fast but still much slower than at home, and the meals were all communal. Basically (and ironically) it was the closest to living under communism I’ve ever been exposed to in my life. It was kind of stifling from a “personal freedom” standpoint - even in the summer you couldn’t just go walk around on the tundra - but it was very cool to be a part of it all, and the job was fun and challenging. What do you want to know? Accommodations were nice and after my hitch I got lots of time off. 10/10 would recommend.
- yosito 3y agoIs it possible to visit an oil rig? Just to stay a few nights and see what life is like on one? And if not, are there any documentaries on movies about life on an oil rig?
- maCDzP 3y agoI sailed a tall ship between Shetland and Norway. We zig zagged between oil rigs. I felt like I was starring in Water World, The Pirates of the Carabeean and The Goonies all at once. It was awesome.
- mLuby 3y agoWas that part of some program?
- maCDzP 3y agoIt was during a two week long sailing course.
- renewiltord 3y agoWhat a tremendous experience! Which ship?
- maCDzP 3y agoIt was T/S Atlantica.
- inasio 3y agoAt a local coffee shop they had paintings for sale of stormy ocean scenes with oil rigs in the mist. I still regret not buying one (it was pretty reasonably priced)
- ilovecurl 3y agoI hear the sound effect of the tripods from the most recent film version of War of the Worlds when looking at these photos.
- ufmace 3y agoNice! I worked on some larger offshore drilling rigs / platforms like those myself. It's a little surreal sometimes spending your days around so much massive machinery.
- tehnub 3y agoThere is a sequence in Cormac McCarthy's recent novel The Passenger where the protagonist spends a few nights alone on an oil rig in a raging storm. It is eerie and beautiful. Creepy while at the same time comfy.
- galkk 3y agoWhen opening, I expected to see something about harsh conditions of life there etc etc, but those are only pictures of rigs. I don't see anything distopian there, only utilitarian. One of things that I recently learned is that many of rigs are actually floating structures. Kind of didn't expect that.