In the context of critical global media studies, this article demonstrates how Western visual-aesthetic registers can invisibilize an existing place and its inhabitants through the uncritical celebration of its imagined futures. Taking Singapore as a case study, the article focuses on two sites of mediatization: the 2018 National Geographic documentary feature, City of the Future: Singapore, and 2019–20 media reports on the filming of HBO’s Westworld in Singapore. It argues that these media artifacts employ the trope of allochronic futurity: a denial of coevalness that seeks recourse in a future time-outside-time. This media trope is produced and sustained by two kinds of registers—a discursive register and a visual-aesthetic register—that inform promotional mediatized genres. While the promotional genres and discourses analyzed here construct Singapore’s distinctiveness, the visual-aesthetic register renders Singapore generic in its visualized futuristic-ness.
{"title":"Singapore, City of the Future","authors":"Joshua Babcock","doi":"10.33137/mt.v8i2.37138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v8i2.37138","url":null,"abstract":"In the context of critical global media studies, this article demonstrates how Western visual-aesthetic registers can invisibilize an existing place and its inhabitants through the uncritical celebration of its imagined futures. Taking Singapore as a case study, the article focuses on two sites of mediatization: the 2018 National Geographic documentary feature, City of the Future: Singapore, and 2019–20 media reports on the filming of HBO’s Westworld in Singapore. It argues that these media artifacts employ the trope of allochronic futurity: a denial of coevalness that seeks recourse in a future time-outside-time. This media trope is produced and sustained by two kinds of registers—a discursive register and a visual-aesthetic register—that inform promotional mediatized genres. While the promotional genres and discourses analyzed here construct Singapore’s distinctiveness, the visual-aesthetic register renders Singapore generic in its visualized futuristic-ness.","PeriodicalId":55637,"journal":{"name":"MediaTropes","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47795606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Drawing principally on public performances in lectures, interviews, and staged presentations, rather than on published texts, this paper discusses McLuhan’s still overlooked contribution to media studies, including a conceptualization of multimodality that defies the logics of literacy, and refutes and refuses its barriers and boundaries. Seen here as a road not taken, McLuhan’s understanding of media, in the form of a transitional theory of media convergence, was an opportunity lost to understand, and to intentionally cultivate, our experience of multimodality, not as a media multiplication, addition, or enhancement, but with the proto-acoustic ‘all-at-once-ness’ of multisensorial convergence. The cost of that lost opportunity for media studies, we argue, has been a conception of multimodality in particular, and media convergence in general, as a ‘multiplication’ driven principally by the characters, capabilities, and economies of digital technologies, not the still vastly untapped sensory and cognitive capabilities of human beings.
{"title":"McLuhan Meets Convergence Culture: Towards a New Multimodal Discourse","authors":"Suzanne de Castell, Milena Droumeva","doi":"10.33137/mt.v8i1.38291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v8i1.38291","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing principally on public performances in lectures, interviews, and staged presentations, rather than on published texts, this paper discusses McLuhan’s still overlooked contribution to media studies, including a conceptualization of multimodality that defies the logics of literacy, and refutes and refuses its barriers and boundaries. Seen here as a road not taken, McLuhan’s understanding of media, in the form of a transitional theory of media convergence, was an opportunity lost to understand, and to intentionally cultivate, our experience of multimodality, not as a media multiplication, addition, or enhancement, but with the proto-acoustic ‘all-at-once-ness’ of multisensorial convergence. The cost of that lost opportunity for media studies, we argue, has been a conception of multimodality in particular, and media convergence in general, as a ‘multiplication’ driven principally by the characters, capabilities, and economies of digital technologies, not the still vastly untapped sensory and cognitive capabilities of human beings.","PeriodicalId":55637,"journal":{"name":"MediaTropes","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48640261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this introduction to the special issue of MediaTropes on “Oil and Media, Oil as Media,” Jordan B. Kinder and Lucie Stepanik provide an account of the stakes and consequences of approaching oil as media as they situate it within the “material turn” of media studies and the broader project energy humanities. They argue that by critically approaching oil and its infrastructures as media, the contributions that comprise this issue puts forward one way to develop an account of oil that further refines the larger tasks and stakes implicit in the energy humanities. Together, these address the myriad ways in which oil mediates social, cultural, and ecological relations, on the one hand, and the ways in which it is mediated, on the other, while thinking through how such mediations might offer glimpses of a future beyond oil.
Jordan B.Kinder和Lucie Stepanik在《媒体奖杯》特刊“石油与媒体，石油即媒体”的引言中，阐述了将石油作为媒体的利害关系和后果，因为他们将其置于媒体研究的“物质转向”和更广泛的项目能源人文学科中。他们认为，通过批判性地将石油及其基础设施作为媒体，构成这一问题的贡献提出了一种发展石油账户的方法，该账户进一步完善了能源人文学科中隐含的更大任务和利害关系。这些内容一方面涉及石油调解社会、文化和生态关系的无数方式，另一方面也涉及石油调解的方式，同时思考这些调解如何为石油之外的未来提供一瞥。
{"title":"Editorial Introduction | Oil and Media, Oil as Media: Mediating Petrocultures Then and Now","authors":"J. Kinder, Lucie Stepanik","doi":"10.33137/mt.v7i2.33699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v7i2.33699","url":null,"abstract":"In this introduction to the special issue of MediaTropes on “Oil and Media, Oil as Media,” Jordan B. Kinder and Lucie Stepanik provide an account of the stakes and consequences of approaching oil as media as they situate it within the “material turn” of media studies and the broader project energy humanities. They argue that by critically approaching oil and its infrastructures as media, the contributions that comprise this issue puts forward one way to develop an account of oil that further refines the larger tasks and stakes implicit in the energy humanities. Together, these address the myriad ways in which oil mediates social, cultural, and ecological relations, on the one hand, and the ways in which it is mediated, on the other, while thinking through how such mediations might offer glimpses of a future beyond oil.","PeriodicalId":55637,"journal":{"name":"MediaTropes","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42131332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Plastic remains one of the most ubiquitous forms that oil takes as a mediating force in our everyday life. This article tracks the way in which this function of plastic has been obfuscated, particularly within the discursive space of academia, by way of a close reading of Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1990 novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. After contextualizing the author’s vision of a neoliberal media culture through a brief history of the recent disciplinary convergences of media studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism, I argue that Yamashita’s novel functions as a proleptic, literary articulation of the kinds of insights made possible by the combination of the three. Through its particular attention to the lifecycle of media—the transformation of plastic from raw material into technical object and then into trash—I argue that the novel offers a theory of plastic as media that usefully emphasizes its relation to the natural world as much as it does its connection to technology and culture.Image Credit: From the cover of Karen Tei Yamashita's book, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Coffee House Press (2017), https://coffeehousepress.org/products/through-the-arc-of-the-rain-forest.
{"title":"“Take A Good Look At It”: Seeing Postcolonial Medianatures with Karen Tei Yamashita","authors":"Walter K. Gordon","doi":"10.33137/mt.v7i2.33676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v7i2.33676","url":null,"abstract":"Plastic remains one of the most ubiquitous forms that oil takes as a mediating force in our everyday life. This article tracks the way in which this function of plastic has been obfuscated, particularly within the discursive space of academia, by way of a close reading of Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1990 novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. After contextualizing the author’s vision of a neoliberal media culture through a brief history of the recent disciplinary convergences of media studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism, I argue that Yamashita’s novel functions as a proleptic, literary articulation of the kinds of insights made possible by the combination of the three. Through its particular attention to the lifecycle of media—the transformation of plastic from raw material into technical object and then into trash—I argue that the novel offers a theory of plastic as media that usefully emphasizes its relation to the natural world as much as it does its connection to technology and culture.Image Credit: From the cover of Karen Tei Yamashita's book, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Coffee House Press (2017), https://coffeehousepress.org/products/through-the-arc-of-the-rain-forest.","PeriodicalId":55637,"journal":{"name":"MediaTropes","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42894641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this brief interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses Thunderbird Strike with Anishinaabe, Metis, and settler-Irish media theorist and artist Elizabeth LaPensee. Thunderbird Strike is a multiplatform, two-dimensional sidescrolling video game created by LaPensee in collaboration with Adrian Cheater and Aubrey Jane Scott (programming), NAHGĄ a.k.a. Casey Koyczan (music and sound effects), and Kaitlin Rose Lenhard (cut scene editing). The conversation is centred on the inspiration for Thunderbird Strike, its reception, and its possibilities as a pedagogical medium.
在这篇简短的采访中，Jordan B.Kinder与Anishinaabe、Metis和爱尔兰定居者媒体理论家兼艺术家Elizabeth LaPensee讨论了《雷鸟出击》。《雷鸟大罢工》是一款多平台二维杂耍视频游戏，由LaPensee与Adrian Cheater和Aubrey Jane Scott（编程）、NAHGĄ又名Casey Koyczan（音乐和音效）和Kaitlin Rose Lenhard（剪辑场景）合作创作。对话集中在《雷鸟出击》的灵感、它的受欢迎程度以及它作为教学媒介的可能性上。
{"title":"“Our Stories about Extraction”: A Brief Interview with Elizabeth LaPensée","authors":"Elizabeth LaPensée, J. Kinder","doi":"10.33137/mt.v7i2.33677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v7i2.33677","url":null,"abstract":"In this brief interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses Thunderbird Strike with Anishinaabe, Metis, and settler-Irish media theorist and artist Elizabeth LaPensee. Thunderbird Strike is a multiplatform, two-dimensional sidescrolling video game created by LaPensee in collaboration with Adrian Cheater and Aubrey Jane Scott (programming), NAHGĄ a.k.a. Casey Koyczan (music and sound effects), and Kaitlin Rose Lenhard (cut scene editing). The conversation is centred on the inspiration for Thunderbird Strike, its reception, and its possibilities as a pedagogical medium.","PeriodicalId":55637,"journal":{"name":"MediaTropes","volume":"7 1","pages":"199-208"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49391431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this artistic contribution, New York-based German artist Heide Hatry offers pictures of her sculpture series Imagine It Thick In Your Own Hair. According to Hatry, the project was intended to make people aware of the tragedy and motivate them to help clean up the disaster BP created in 2010 with the Deepwater Horizon spill. Hatry is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs, and cremated remains. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, death, the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst.
{"title":"Imagine It Thick In Your Own Skin: Sculptures and a Unique Artist’s Book","authors":"Heide Hatry","doi":"10.33137/mt.v7i2.33674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v7i2.33674","url":null,"abstract":"In this artistic contribution, New York-based German artist Heide Hatry offers pictures of her sculpture series Imagine It Thick In Your Own Hair. According to Hatry, the project was intended to make people aware of the tragedy and motivate them to help clean up the disaster BP created in 2010 with the Deepwater Horizon spill. Hatry is best known for her body-related performances and her work employing animal flesh and organs, and cremated remains. Among her fundamental preoccupations are identity, death, the nature of aesthetic experience and the meaning of beauty, the effects of knowledge upon perception, the human exploitation of the natural world, and the social oblivion that permits atrocity to persist in our midst.","PeriodicalId":55637,"journal":{"name":"MediaTropes","volume":"7 1","pages":"120-137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49498511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet with Patrick McCurdy. The Beast is a 2018 graphic novel published by independent Canadian publisher Ad Astra Comix. It is the result of a collaboration between communications scholar Patrick McCurdy, writer Hugh Goldring, and artist Nicole Marie Burton. Emerging from McCurdy’s work on the MediaToil database project—a database that gathers together competing visual representations of the Athabasca Oil Sands from several stakeholders—the graphic novel addresses themes that arise from these representations while creatively exploring and navigating the tensions at the core of trying to live well in our current petroculture, a culture underwritten by neoliberalism and economic precarity.
在这次采访中，Jordan B. Kinder与Patrick McCurdy讨论了《野兽:在垂死的星球上谋生》。《野兽》是加拿大独立出版商Ad Astra Comix于2018年出版的漫画小说。它是传播学学者帕特里克·麦科迪、作家休·戈德林和艺术家妮可·玛丽·伯顿合作的结果。McCurdy在MediaToil数据库项目上的工作——一个收集了来自几个利益相关者的阿萨巴斯卡油砂的竞争性视觉表现的数据库——图像小说提出了从这些表现中产生的主题，同时创造性地探索和引导了试图在我们当前的石油文化中生活得更好的核心紧张关系，这种文化由新自由主义和经济不稳定所支撑。
{"title":"Making “The Beast”: An Interview with Patrick McCurdy","authors":"Patrick McCurdy, J. Kinder","doi":"10.33137/mt.v7i2.33673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v7i2.33673","url":null,"abstract":"In this interview, Jordan B. Kinder discusses The Beast: Making a Living on a Dying Planet with Patrick McCurdy. The Beast is a 2018 graphic novel published by independent Canadian publisher Ad Astra Comix. It is the result of a collaboration between communications scholar Patrick McCurdy, writer Hugh Goldring, and artist Nicole Marie Burton. Emerging from McCurdy’s work on the MediaToil database project—a database that gathers together competing visual representations of the Athabasca Oil Sands from several stakeholders—the graphic novel addresses themes that arise from these representations while creatively exploring and navigating the tensions at the core of trying to live well in our current petroculture, a culture underwritten by neoliberalism and economic precarity.","PeriodicalId":55637,"journal":{"name":"MediaTropes","volume":"7 1","pages":"105-119"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42466618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay argues that one of the factors holding back civilization-wide transitions to renewable energy is the widespread tendency to render petroleum and other hydrocarbons abject and abstract. Fossil fuel industry representations do this by hiding the true costs of petroculture behind the virtualization Energy; environmentalist framings do it by relying too much on petroaesthetics of doom (i.e., apocalyptic imagery) and gloom (i.e., Gothic visualizations of oil spills and rusting extractive infrastructure). The scarcity of representations of hydrocarbons that acknowledge both their life-giving and life-destroying properties, their powerful nonhuman agency in mediating practically every human and nonhuman relationship in the modern world, makes it hard to imagine alternatives to petroculture. Recently, artists have begun subverting petroaesthetic conventions in ways that counter the abstraction and abjection of hydrocarbons, including by using crude oil as an artistic medium in its own right. The oddly playful bitumen sands photographs of Louis Helbig, the bitumen-based “petrographs” of Warren Cariou, and the weird, enthralling “oilscapes” of Kathleen Thum are interpreted as meaningful challenges to the petroaesthetic status quo—provocations that matter in every sense of the word. Beyond merely promoting energy transitions, these images perform transitions as they empower viewers to see hydrocarbons as media with which all living things are deeply entangled.
{"title":"Beyond Doom and Gloom in Petroaesthetics: Facing Oil, Making Energy Matter","authors":"Bart H. Welling","doi":"10.33137/mt.v7i2.33675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v7i2.33675","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that one of the factors holding back civilization-wide transitions to renewable energy is the widespread tendency to render petroleum and other hydrocarbons abject and abstract. Fossil fuel industry representations do this by hiding the true costs of petroculture behind the virtualization Energy; environmentalist framings do it by relying too much on petroaesthetics of doom (i.e., apocalyptic imagery) and gloom (i.e., Gothic visualizations of oil spills and rusting extractive infrastructure). The scarcity of representations of hydrocarbons that acknowledge both their life-giving and life-destroying properties, their powerful nonhuman agency in mediating practically every human and nonhuman relationship in the modern world, makes it hard to imagine alternatives to petroculture. Recently, artists have begun subverting petroaesthetic conventions in ways that counter the abstraction and abjection of hydrocarbons, including by using crude oil as an artistic medium in its own right. The oddly playful bitumen sands photographs of Louis Helbig, the bitumen-based “petrographs” of Warren Cariou, and the weird, enthralling “oilscapes” of Kathleen Thum are interpreted as meaningful challenges to the petroaesthetic status quo—provocations that matter in every sense of the word. Beyond merely promoting energy transitions, these images perform transitions as they empower viewers to see hydrocarbons as media with which all living things are deeply entangled.","PeriodicalId":55637,"journal":{"name":"MediaTropes","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47844192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores how fossil fuels are expressed on the surface of specific media: billboards. It is based on observations made during a “scholarly” road trip to West Texas aimed at studying the protests surrounding the construction of the Trans-Pecos Pipeline. Blending travel writing with a theoretical analysis of billboards, the article investigates the philosophy behind the Shale Revolution and examines the specific petroculture of the Permian Basin. Given their necessary conciseness, clarity and effectiveness, billboards contain both straightforward messages and profound subliminal cultural references. This makes them meaningful means to understand how oil and gas are embedded in the culture of Oil Country. It is argued that billboards related to fossil fuel extraction constitute nuanced forms of “petromedia” whose semantics and design reinforce a specific “philosophy of energy.” The petrocultural philosophy of West Texas is strongly anthropocentric and promotes ideas such as the instrumentality of nature, domination over untamed land, technoscientific power, drilling prowess, rugged individualism, and masculinity.
{"title":"Billboards and Petrocultures In West Texas","authors":"G. Frigo","doi":"10.33137/mt.v7i2.33672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v7i2.33672","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how fossil fuels are expressed on the surface of specific media: billboards. It is based on observations made during a “scholarly” road trip to West Texas aimed at studying the protests surrounding the construction of the Trans-Pecos Pipeline. Blending travel writing with a theoretical analysis of billboards, the article investigates the philosophy behind the Shale Revolution and examines the specific petroculture of the Permian Basin. Given their necessary conciseness, clarity and effectiveness, billboards contain both straightforward messages and profound subliminal cultural references. This makes them meaningful means to understand how oil and gas are embedded in the culture of Oil Country. It is argued that billboards related to fossil fuel extraction constitute nuanced forms of “petromedia” whose semantics and design reinforce a specific “philosophy of energy.” The petrocultural philosophy of West Texas is strongly anthropocentric and promotes ideas such as the instrumentality of nature, domination over untamed land, technoscientific power, drilling prowess, rugged individualism, and masculinity.","PeriodicalId":55637,"journal":{"name":"MediaTropes","volume":"7 1","pages":"67-104"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48407895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the publicity and advertising campaigns undertaken by the British Petroleum Company (BP) during the 1920s, focusing specifically on the Persian Khan exhibit mounted at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–1925. Despite their rich value as primary sources, the marketing campaigns of British oil companies—and in particular of BP—have been relatively overlooked by historians. Using an energy humanities approach, the article reconstructs the Khan exhibit and its galleries, revealing an imaginary world in which oil was framed as an exotic prize held captive beneath wild and inhospitable landscapes. As BP’s most elaborate and expensive advertising campaign of the 1920s, seen and visited by millions, the Persian Khan exhibit provides a valuable lens through which to view the broader development of British attitudes toward oil during the period.
{"title":"Advertising an Empire of Oil: The British Petroleum Company and the Persian Khan Exhibit of 1924–1925","authors":"Ian Wereley","doi":"10.33137/mt.v7i2.33668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33137/mt.v7i2.33668","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the publicity and advertising campaigns undertaken by the British Petroleum Company (BP) during the 1920s, focusing specifically on the Persian Khan exhibit mounted at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–1925. Despite their rich value as primary sources, the marketing campaigns of British oil companies—and in particular of BP—have been relatively overlooked by historians. Using an energy humanities approach, the article reconstructs the Khan exhibit and its galleries, revealing an imaginary world in which oil was framed as an exotic prize held captive beneath wild and inhospitable landscapes. As BP’s most elaborate and expensive advertising campaign of the 1920s, seen and visited by millions, the Persian Khan exhibit provides a valuable lens through which to view the broader development of British attitudes toward oil during the period.","PeriodicalId":55637,"journal":{"name":"MediaTropes","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43309363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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