Eikon | Issue #121
Eikon | Issue #121
Since 1991, the magazine EIKON has dealt with Austrian and International artists in the field of photography and media art. Quarterly, with an average of 100 pages, the international magazine offers well-founded articles in German and English alongside extended picture spreads.
——-
release date: 23 Feb 2023
(Magazine ships from Austria in 5-12 working days)
Already used in various ways by the ancient oriental civilizations, the fossil raw material petroleum advanced to become a ubiquitously used resource with the beginning of the industrial age, which is still used today not only as a fuel for combustion engines and for energy generation, but also forms the basis of countless everyday products - from clothing to plastic (packaging) to medicines. Today, however, we are confronted with the downside of this petroculture, which once enabled mankind to make so much supposed progress and which went hand in hand with seemingly endless economic growth: The consequences of ruthless exploitation, unrestricted mobility, insatiable production of ever more consumer goods while at the same time neglecting the fact that all the emissions and products produced are de facto non-degradable, are currently melting polar ice caps, causing freshwater sources to dry up, polluting oceans, in short: destroying our planet.
Ernst Logar has been studying crude oil since a working visit in 2008 to Aberdeen - a port metropolis in northeast Scotland dominated by the oil industry, with dozens of offshore platforms. A research project currently based at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Department of Site-Specific Art) and initiated by the artist, Reflecting Oil: Arts-Based Research on Oil Transitions, reflects from an artistic perspective the different facets that arise from the extraction of crude oil as the basis of our contemporary society. A first report of the colloquium, which was realized with the involvement of interdisciplinary actors and whose synopsis will also be published in book form one year later, is presented in this issue's eponymous focus with a text by Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi. (Nela Eggenberger for EIKON, February 2023)