The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs | Hacker News Reader

The unintentional dystopian beauty of oil rigs

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285 pointsdgudkov144 comments

One 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

>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.

I 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.

Industry and in some sense "machinery" itself is largely seen as inherently negative, destructive, "unnatural", "against" by many today.

Which is ironic as the vast majority of the human population, including the very same people with such views, are only alive because of substantial amounts of machinery. Such as those used in the Haber-Bosch process.

lol this is literally that "and yet you participate in society. curious!" joke comic?

No, not really though. Phones are not necessary for survival but food made more available and cheap is necessary.

Why yes, I do participate in society. Curious!

Why, yes, I do moralize every time I get the chance without offering true alternatives! Who cares if poor people suffer?

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

On an even more fundamentally ridiculous level too. The people being (Alanis Morissette) "ironic" here have absolutely no choice in the matter of literally being born.

For those unfamiliar it's this comic that was simplified to the final panel [0]. It's a great send up of a whole arm of bad faith debate tactics that tries to invalidate any criticism of topic X because the person benefits from it.

[0] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...

Water is very destructive and yet, where would be be without it. Same goes for oil and gas.

Water isn't oil though, the former is biologically necessary and the latter is socially necessary. It also wasn't really what I'm talking about but I'll bite none the less.

I'm not really saying we get rid of it fully but we don't need anywhere near the oil and gas industry we have. About 67% [0] of extracted oil used in the US goes into the transportation sector in one form or another and an additional 6% goes into power generation.

We could eliminate a lot of that consumption through building things like nuclear plants and various green energy sources and by reducing the reliance on cars in the US. Unfortunately that latter option is going to be fighting against decades of culture and choices built into our cities, but we could also shift away from gas cars as well and it fortunately seems like we are at least headed that way though I'm betting we'll encounter a plateau in electric car adoption well before they outnumber gas vehicles.

Even if we only shifted most consumer vehicles over to some gas alternative we could probably eliminate at least a third of all oil products consumed in the US. More if electric trucks pan out though that's a trickier proposition just due to how they're used. Those two changes don't even really require large changes to how we operate our world today just shifting the energy demand away from fossil fuel onto electric.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

Oil is now biologically necessary for this population to survive: the Haber-Bosch process.

You skipped the whole bit of my comment where I talked about the percentages that go into industrial uses vs transportation I guess? Only 27% of the oil extracted goes into the entire industrial use of oil.

Are you asking me a question about this 'joke comic'?

I haven't heard of it, so you'll have to explain.

someone else posted it in this thread check it out https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...

Real, canonical, link: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Huh according to popularity metrics that site doesn't even rank in the top 200000 globally, and only in the 70000s for just the U.S.

If this was a top 1000 site I might get why there's an expectation to know about their 'joke comics', but when it's so obscure, I doubt even 1% of HN readers would know anything about this site.

It seems odd giraffe_lady would phrase it in that way.

Like many pieces of modern internet culture, this image has been detached from its real source and context, and propagated memetically through the various social media platforms.

It doesn't seem like the large majority of the HN audience would participate in this, so it's still a bit weird to assume other readers would know the reference.

The large majority of the HN audience wouldn't participate in social media? I'm not sure what dividing line you're trying to draw here.

Communication is always in part a game of references. They are a form of compression of larger and more specific ideas, and of humor, which itself is a primary vector of communication.

I'm not sure what demographic I'd belong to, but I understood the reference just fine, and it seems like many of the other participants in the thread did too.

I'm sure you've got references that I'd miss completely, that you believe to be obvious.

> The large majority of the HN audience wouldn't participate in social media?

For the spreading meme 'joke comics' portion, yes.

I highly doubt even a quarter of the reader-base would participate in this.

Its an extremely common meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

Probably literally 1,000x as many people have seen that comic, as have ever visited the site it originated on. And that may be an underestimate.

I think it would be far more engaging and interesting to respond to the point being made rather than the noteworthyness of the source? I think we can maintain a critical distance to the force that allow us to live the way we do, and i do not believe this reduces us to mere hypocrites. The ability to admire and admonish these practices is deeply human!

You could read this as "you can't say anything bad about the industrial complex because you participate in it", though I think that is pretty obviously bad faith. A more charitable interpretation I would take is "whatever misgivings you have about large scale industrial practices, it's important to remember that they also massively benefit society and are in some cases necessary." Pointing out the flaws is great, villanizing is counterproductive.

I think at this stage large scale for profit petroleum extraction is literally villainous, so I'm ok villainizing. Whether it's productive to is a question of tactics that I wouldn't expect to find consensus on even among like-minded people.

There's potentially a nuanced and worthwhile conversation about what carefully ramping down fossil fuel use looks like, what responsibility we have to the people who haven't been able to take advantage of extraction yet, etc. But it's not like I'm interrupting that conversation to point this out here.

This is straightforwardly admiring the artifacts of a destructive practice and preemptively shaming & dismissing people who would find that distasteful.

A lathe can turn precise bores. Those can be used to make guns, which can be used to kill people. From my perspective, the analogy is you're anti-gun violence, but going after the people who admire the precision of the metalworking tools.

If you want to move away from fossil fuels, yes that's great. I'm with you. You're going to want the people with an appreciation for this kind of engineering on your side, as it will be necessary for transitioning any advanced economy.

If the problem is as bad as we all seem to agree it is, maybe we should cooperate to solve it instead of playing king of the hill for the moral high ground.

Applying this metaphor to this case, you're admiring the weapon, not the tool that made the weapon.

It's very presumptuous for you to be telling me what _I_ admire. I get to make that choice.

I admire feats of engineering. I've toured facilities that pump carbon out of the ground, I've toured facilities that capture carbon and pump it into the ground. They're both impressive in their own right, and it's the same skillsets and technologies required to build both.

I didn't pick the analogy here friend.

lathe : gun :: _____ : oil drilling platform, you put your own words in there if you want.

Regardless I'm within my own rights to tell you that what you admire is bad and your admiration of it is obscene.

I did pick my own words. "Feats of engineering". You are well withing your rights to tell me whatever you want sure, I'm also within mine to tell you what your saying doesn't make sense.

Appreciating the field of engineering isn't "bad" or "obscene" just because some instances of engineering lead to real negative consequences. That's a descent into the exact "society has parts that are bad, yet you participate" logic you were originally clowning on.

Great switch to "for profit" from the general "

You do realize that petroleum is not just for fuel but plays a major part in every part of our lives?

E.g. fertilizers. This kind of zero-order thinking without thinking of higher-order effects is what lead to this:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

Real life is not Captain Planet (the cartoon) where everything is as binary as you point out.

The machinery looks the same regardless of the economic system. (I suppose a Soviet oil rig might have looked a little different, but basically the same thing)

Your argument equally applies to people, since we collectively cause all of the environmental problems you mention.

Are you consistent? Do you admire people? Do you find it distastful if others do?

It really is not. There’s a difference in seeking improvement in a system in which you participate and the current mainstream nihilism that demonizes our past achievements and seeks its destruction.

This puts it in a way I was struggling to do so. The "we are just saying we should improve society somewhat" counterclaim is disingenuous because the "we should improve society somewhat" is usually expressed in criticism and not solutions, and when solutions are suggested they are pretty vapid and full of wishful thinking.

Funnily enough, your response fits exactly these two memes: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/201/090/208...

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/222/974/b91...

Especially given the context of the thread, where your reply barely makes sense. There is a difference between criticizing extreme industrialism and rabid growth and villifying the very thing we all depend on. Which is totally different from just wanting to improve society somewhat ;)

But westerners are so detached from everything that goes into sustaining their lives so there is oddly little awareness of the massive industry needed since it is all outsource over seas. Makes it very easy to dislike it from far away, especially when memes can be used to rationalize away the hypocrisy and pretend the privilege they enjoy doesn't exist

(the meme basically amounts to "yes I'm privileged, but stop pointing it out! There's nothing I can do about my own privilege, I HAVE to own that iPhone too bad for the workers lol" and is the ultimate witty retort from privileged, usually white liberal people. Which is funny since those are the people who usually like to speak about privilege, but obviously not when they are called out on it themselves.)

No, I don't think you quite understand the implication. Something like 60% of the bioavailable nitrogen in the biosphere, including that in your human body, is created industrially via the haber-bosch process. Over half of all human beings and land biomass would be dead without it. Human beings and this industrial process produce more bioavailable nitrogen than all the nitrogen fixing microbes in the world combined. This process is a very important part of the earth's biosphere now with human presence taken into account, bioavailable nitrogen production is the bottleneck to biomass production. It is probably our only viable tool to actually reduce carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere.

I don’t think you understand the comic or you overlooked the thread above. It’s ironic because calling something as basic as “machinery” inherently evil has an inherently evil implication, which is that 95% of the population would need to die.

This is nothing like “you participate, how curious”. This is “I’m against literally every piece of technology required to feed any non-negligible portion of the humans on earth”.

If a slave owner has a forced breeding program, should the children of his slaves praise the institution of slavery for the gift of their lives?

That’s not a really good analogies. The real question is: are the people complaining about all industry ready to live in a world without industry? To which the answer is obviously no for most of them. It’s akin to asking: do you want 90% of the global population to die of starvation?

Well, perhaps the problem isn't where you think it lies.

They may be willing to acknowledge your question and answer it with a whispered "yes", if you at least ask it in a way that cause them no excessive shame. Your denialism that the answer could be yes isn't quite the same thing as it being an "obvious no".

We all wander through a landscape of horrific truths that we blind ourselves to just to remain sane.

I feel there is an untold implication here that people somehow assume that the _other_ 90% would die of starvation. Surely not them!

I don't think that's a good analogy either. It's not like a wish will be granted and we'll all still be here but suddenly without tractors. The alternative to consider is being born into a world where industrialization took off slower and culture had more time to understand the consequences before they got really severe.

So it's just complaining that history didn't happen a certain way? Okay I guess.

I wouldn't mind if 90% of the population had never been born (even myself)

I wouldn't mind to have been born a giant, but here we are.

I get that some folks feel bad about human's impact on the earth, but you're going down a very concerning road here. I'm glad I was born, and I'm glad my child was born. I would love for us to move quicker towards a world that isn't trashing the earth like we are now.

I do however get a little concerned about the opinions of those who wished humans existed in far fewer numbers, especially when that involves a wish for a mass die-off (or cull!). You (or whomever) are free to hold whatever opinions you like, but when people start talking about advocating for allowing or promoting the death of large numbers of people, that's when I ask you to politely fuck off.

I never said anything about a mass die off, nobody is harmed by not having been born in the first place. We don't even need a mass die-off anyhow, we just need population control. Without population control we're going to have a mass die-off though, it's unavoidable due to the inherent unsustainability of our resource use.

I didn't say you were asking for that, but that line of reasoning often trends in that direction, and my opinions were directed those who hold those stronger views.

Do we need population control? For the vast majority of industrialized countries their birth rate is and has been well below replacement levels for decades. We're going to have a much smaller population pretty soon, and there's nothing anyone can do to change that now.

We'll see what plays out in the next few decades, but you've effectively already going to have what you're calling for. I don't think it's going to be a fun situation though - demographic collapse is no joke. Cutting down the replacement population numbers from there just seems like you'd be making a bad situation worse.

Not very long ago the average human was David and Nature was Goliath. Vast swaths of land seemed to be unbreakable by mankind, yet now the tables have turned and for many it's cringe-worthy to watch the big Humans pummeling the land with ease at a rate where the land can put up no defense

Well, I am certainly as far from techno-phobia as it might be possible, but oil rigs are examples of machinery which are connected to large damages to the environment. Not so much the machines themselves, but the oil they have been pumping. See also those - by themselves - magnificient excavators to dig for lignite. Great machinery, but if you consider the outcome, it is very dystropian.

Nevertheless, they are engineering marvels and as such quite a view to behold.

Strong Koyaanisqatsi vibes. Very interesting.

> the video captures the otherworldliness of oil production and large scale infrastructure in a hypnotic way

If you're in to that kind of stuff check out Koyaanisqatsi & Powaqqatsi

Or Baraka and Samsara if you'd prefer films of the same tradition, minus the somewhat over-the-top Philip Glass scores (which I enjoy more on their own than as part of the films).

Samsara is excellent. I watched in an indie cinema, and it really generated a mood without any form of judgement in what was being portrayed.

Not a decade goes by, not a decade, without someone mentioning Koyaanisqatsi.

It's in my top 5 "must watch" movies.

There is also LUCKY PEOPLE CENTER INTERNATIONAL [0]

0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8BZd7IBr2Y&t=3

I've always strangely found Oil Derricks to be aesthetically pleasing for some reason.

Maybe it's just because of There Will Be Blood.

Wow! Hard to believe that’s produced by Shell. A outside of any environmental or idealogical perspective, I found it deeply unsettling just on a visual and auditory level.

Previous comment beat me to it... This is Koyaanisqatsi for petroleum.

There 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 which is 303 meters under the water surface:

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.

If 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

- Byford Dolphin: 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.

IMHO 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.

Don'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.

I 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.

It 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.

It happens with human artists that don't bother understanding the things they draw. What is just a way of saying that yes, human can emulate those NLP¹ AIs, but we can choose not to. (And no, it doesn't take a strong focus on realism. Our world has all kinds of mechanics that most people understand.)

1 - We do need a name for this characteristic, because NPL AI is anything that talks with humans

I'd imagine it was rarely trained on images of random industry equipment

When I was a kid I loved (who am I kidding, I still love them) the Incredible Cross-Sections books which have exploded-view drawings of tons of machines, real and fictional. The oil rig in particular sticks out in my mind because that’s how I learned they were movable and had their own engines. Seeing all the different parts and what they were for was fascinating.

Here's the Incredible Cross-Section of an oil rig:

https://i.imgur.com/oiMObcE.jpeg

Interesting! That is not the one I remember. I did some digging and realized it was actually the “Look Inside Cross-Sections” series of books I had as a kid, though I can’t find the oil rig from there on the internet.

They 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.

Oh 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#

When 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

What 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.

I believe you've probably seen these in Cromarty Firth, featured in this Tim Traveller's YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSOaHpydv8

I think you could be right!

if 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 ).

That's a great scene and I would definitely enjoy seeing the Gulf Coast.

I believe Ridley Scott was inspired by the steel works of Sheffield at night to create the landscape of Blade Runner.

Similarly it wouldn't surprise at all if James Cameron used Gulf Coast oil refineries for inspiration.

Heavy industry is a raw old sight.

My father did computer hardware work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico up til I was conceived and he decided to get a less dangerous job at IBM. My entire childhood he had a picture on his desk he took from the evac boat of the oil rig he worked on in flames after some accident a few years before I was born. So yeah, definitely only usually!

Got a specific location I can check out on Google maps?

Right, it's not just offshore oil rigs, it can be processing facilities deep onshore, like in a place appropriately named Commerce City:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/suncor-prepares-to-reop...

And it's the Gulf Coast where there can be a lot this for miles, it's 24/7. Flaring is of course, "normal":

https://www.facebook.com/KRIS6News/videos/live-view-from-our...

For my life's work I needed to become very comfortable working in this environment, especially where the big ships are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW9Frtkqy3Y

Dystopias are us.

Back 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!

As 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.

Any references to look into? Sounds cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condeep

I 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

At 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.)

I 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.

I'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.

Yup. It's a rig. It can search or reach for oil among other things.

That said, what does exploratory mean in this context?

It 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.)

As for me, I'm not clear at all what this has to do with redox reactions and stoichiometry? Oxidation Is Loss - Reduction Is Gain.

I 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.

If 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.

> 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.

Highly recommend this related short story by China Miéville: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/22/china-mieville...

The 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.

I 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.

Was that part of some program?

It was during a two week long sailing course.

What a tremendous experience! Which ship?

It was T/S Atlantica.

https://nitter.net/FedeItaliano76/status/1650871570137600000

I 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.

I 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....

Like the Kowloon city, the form of these objects was evolved out of necessity, step by step. One requirement after another.

They look roughly like one would imagine Vogon spaceships to.

At 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)

Scrolling 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/WorldsDeepes...

Documentary Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YtCHHpZNxo

Working 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.

Could 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.

For 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.

Nice! 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.

When 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.

I think you'll find these are (mostly) oil _platforms_ not oil rigs.

Source: http://www.theshippinglawblog.com/2018/08/what-is-difference...

I find only the very first pic somehow appealing. I do not really see any "beauty" there.

For 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.

Oh, 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.

I 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

Same for me with large airports. There's just something about the scale that is fascinating.

Well 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.

"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-i... which I find disgusting, though similarly detailed. Maybe it's just the whole "familiarity breeds contempt" thing.

I 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.

I 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

I 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.

There 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.

I 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.

If 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?

Is 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?

I hear the sound effect of the tripods from the most recent film version of War of the Worlds when looking at these photos.

I find myself strangely drawn to dystopian aesthetic. There’s something deeply moving about them.

Twitter 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

That comment seems pretty reasonable. Would it be better if they didn't and have a O&G related name?

Yes these are unintentionally beautiful yet windfarms are a complete eyesore (sarcasm)

poor wind factor

We don't dig up our dead. Why are we digging up and burning dead animals and plants?

That'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.

It says "dystopian beauty". A begonia is not dystopian beauty.

I'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.

Ah but the Buddha exists in all things (ZAMM).

even pedophiles ? I don't like that buddha guy

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