How to praxis after the end of the world with more than so-called humans? (2024)

Energy In American History: A Political, Social, and Environmental Encyclopedia (2024)

Published by Bloomsbury. I wrote the entries for the Federal Power Commission, Samuel Kier, and Whale Oil.

Heliotechniques and Whatbeings (2022)

SEED JOURNEY PAMPHLET SERIES
2022

This pamphlet series has been realised in the framework of the exhibition
What’s for Tea? An offsite project with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary

Art, Gateshead and Travelling Gallery, Edinburgh.

BALTIC

Excerpts of the Tome of Light (June 2022)

IMAGINATIONS 13-1 | Critical and Creative Engagements with Petro-Media. June 14, 2022.

LRLX Publication #6: Placeless (December 2021)

In 2015, the cover of the first LRLX publication stated, “The Living Room Light Exchange is always located in a place.” Six years later, LRLX Publication 6 is Placeless. After many years of being rooted, our planetary circumstances, the earthly unrooting of all things, require that we—the organizers and community members of LRLX—examine placelessness in the context of not only this Bay Area community but the greater macrocosmic condition. This becoming placeless that many humans and nonhumans have already experienced, through a global pandemic, a political crisis, and a lack of will from leadership, has been normalized. The speculation of collapse that Octavia Butler describes is here: environmental, political, and social infrastructural breakdown. Placeless aims to consider the transformative experience of placelessness that the world, in its interconnected, technological, geopolitical, climactic, and migrational conditions, increasingly propels beyond a survival threshold.

Our sixth annual publication features work by Jenny Odell, nkiruka oparah, Char Stiles, LRLX NY organizers Sarah Burke and Nicholas O'Brien, Marisa Elena Duarte and Jacob Meders, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, a survey of LRLX season 7 by Helen Shewolfe Tseng, and a special edition textile print book wrap by Ranu Mukherjee. Placeless is designed by Justin Carder.

Field Notes for Future Petropractices: Refiguring Oil and/as Media (March 2021)

Media+Enviornment, Volume 3, Issue 1, Mediating Art and Science, University of California Press

The seemingly prosaic question “What is oil?” opens up a mystifying world of new conceptual frameworks, ethics, and material circumstances. What does it mean to think with oil beyond the practices of representation that enact its contemporary form?
Between 2015 and 2018, my ongoing critical and creative oil research led to a series of crude oil media artworks, which illuminate, materialize, and reexamine basic assumptions of oil. Thinking with the diffractive methods of feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad, “Field Notes for Future Petropractices” addresses the artworks Oil Ontology (2017), Crude Illumination (2015), and Oil rituals for the future #6 (2018). Each of these uses the enigmatic product Crudoleum, 100% Pennsylvania Crude Oil Scalp Treatment, to enact the open-ended performativity of oil.

My critical and creative practice, in which practices of making reciprocally determine and blur with practices of thinking, examines the early American oil industry and its entanglements with mysticism. This period matters because it is the commonly accepted historical origination of crude oil as a global energy commodity. As new energy regimes and new critiques of the Anthropocene emerge, it is crucial to continue examining how the ontological status of oil as a fossil fuel persists. Why is it taken for granted that oil—an earth material that exceeds anthropocentric categorization—is represented exclusively as fuel?

Crude Illumination: A Crude Oil Art Inspection (April 2021)

This statement details Elia Vargas’s hybrid research art practice and examines alternative histories of crude oil through the social practice of “Art Inspector” Danielle Siembieda. Using art inspection as a crea- tive framework for understanding the entangled nature and culture of the product Crudoleum, invented by American mystic Edgar Cayce, Siembieda evaluates Vargas’s crude oil art practice through an assess- ment of its environmental impacts. The performative inspection speculatively and empirically examines assumptions about the materiality of oil. The purpose of this statement is twofold: to analyze the constitution of Crudoleum, contextualizing it within a history of other petropractices, and to continue Vargas’s ongoing critique of the perspective that fossil fuels are ontologically determinate by humans

LRLX Publication 5 Rare Earth: The Ground Is Not Digital (October 2020)

The Earth is not a historical subject waiting to be activated by industrial-techno capitalist logic in “new” digital space. Yet, rare earth elements are intimately—and invisibly—entangled within daily life. The fifth annual publication of the Living Room Light Exchange is a large format broadsheet that features work by artists Praba Pilar, Carrie Hott, Maya Weeks, a unique edition rare earth element postcard designed by Tiare Ribeaux, a survey of LRLX season 6 by Elisabeth Nicula, and an introduction by micha cárdenas. Rare Earth: The Ground is Not Digital explores the conundrum of technologies “of(f) the ground” (Parikka, 2015), future natures, climate precarity, and proposes rethinking the entanglements of human activities that place a collectively inherited rare Earth at risk.

Atmosphere: A speculative fiction exquisite corpse under shelter in place (June 2020)

Exhibited as part of Accumulations, curated by Daniel Lichtman in association with -emypre- soft-skinned space, November 2020.

On March 16, 2020, at the beginning stages of global social distancing, I initiated an experiment in thinking together from afar with friends, artists, writers, and educators across five continents: a speculative fiction exquisite corpse. Beginning with my own entry—the middle—two participants extended the writing chronologically before and after. Continuing in this way, 42 people from across the planet participated, with one person simultaneously adding to before as another added to after. Designed by Natalie Sims.

Living Room Light Exchange Publication No. 4: Spellwork - Technologies and Conjurings (October 2019)

The Living Room Light Exchange’s fourth annual publication, Spellwork: Technologies and Conjurings calls forth the techno-witches, wizards, sorcerers, animists, and magicians. Featuring LRLX artists Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Ingrid Burrington, Yetunde Olagbaju, and Cassie Thornton, Spellwork provokes the possibility that technology and magic have always been entangled rituals. These artists explore the double bind of magic in technology and the technology of magic. This publication also includes a limited edition Silicon Beach crystal pendant bookmark by artist Nina Sarnelle and a survey of LRLX season 5 by Bay Area arts writers. Together we embrace the technologies of witches, demons and goddesses, and we seek the benign magic of the everyday. Purchase here.

From Inside this Earth (2019)

From Inside This Earth is a new series of unique photographs by Johnna Arnold, created by putting small amounts of used motor oil into a traditional color enlarger. The limited edition folio expands upon this work, incorporating mono-prints made with crude motor oil, a journal entry of all the petroleum products the artist touched in one day, a diagram of how oil is currently used, and an essay by Elia Vargas entitled "Towards a Cosmomaterialism of Oil: new diffractions on a process of light".

Living Room Light Exchange Publication No. 3: After the Internet (October 2018)

Published and edited by Elia Vargas and Liat Berdugo, the third installment of Living Room Light Exchange’s Publications investigates the question of future networks. Somewhere between utopian dreams and dystopian net neutrality collapses lies alternative possibilities of a network that could be otherwise. Buy your copy here.

The Great Sublimation (July 6, 2018)

Written by Elia Vargas and Dorothy Santos and featured on VICE Motherboard, The Great Sublimation explores the following question: What gives rise to intelligence, artificial or otherwise? And is language enough to understand—or contain—it? Read the full story here.

Image by Jenny Odell

Lubricated Substrates: Earth Infrastructure, Light and the Oil Ontology (2017)

A speculative catalog designed by Sming Sming Books for my solo exhibition at B4BEL4B. Featuring essays by cultural critic TJ Demos, arts writer Dorothy Santos, and myself.

“Is energy itself a metaphor? In a western human comprehension of energy, the web of associations that the word contains expands beyond material properties such as solar radiation, hydrocarbons, and other various combustible potentialities. Energy also contains within it an assumed understanding of all the ethical questions which surround energy-use, efficiencies, and extractive moralities.”

Dust As (August 29, 2017)

“The earth itself is a cyborg. So declares our otherworldly narrator in the opening line of Dorothy Santos and Elia Vargas's meditation on what a nonhuman observer "processing" our planet for the first time—for undisclosed reasons—might find. The work is excerpted from San Francisco Bay Area-based art/tech/media theorist collective Living Room Light Exchange, whose second published book is STATE CHANGE. Check it out for more cerebral weirdness and thoughtful prognostications of our ever-precarious future moment. Enjoy.” - the editor of VICE Motherboard

Written by Elia Vargas and Dorothy Santos, Image by Jenny Odell

To read Dust As, click here.

Living Room Light Exchange Publication No. 2: State Change (May 2017)

This book features commissions of new works from new media artists, writers, and media theorists in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, a nexus of the technology industry, and from satellite Light Exchanges in New York, Paris, and Tel Aviv. Published and edited by Elia Vargas and Liat Berdugo, this is the second series of award winning curatorial publications, gathering the work of current new media artists who question the role of technology, extraction, avatars, surveillance, and more.

Publication Two was printed as a limited edition run of 200 books, 140 pages, color, each containing a bookmark of “Fuck Trump” protest stickers by artist Jenny Odell. The launch of this book was made possible by an Alternative Exposure grant from Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco, CA, and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Participating artists include: 100 DAYS ACTION, LaTurbo Avedon, Liat Berdugo, BlinkPopShift, Kevin Chen, Alex Cruse, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, James David Lee, T.J. Demos, Benjamin Gaulon, Tanya Gayer, Desiree Holman, Parker Higgins, Jason Huff, Rao Li, Rose Linke, Charlie Macquarie, Tom Marioni, Takako Matoba, Forrest McGarvey, Elisabeth Nicula, Jenny Odell, Rebecca Ora, A. Laurie Palmer, Rick Prelinger, Andy Puls, Eden Redmond, Tiare Ribeaux, Antonio Roberts, Dorothy Santos, Caroline Sinders, Theo Triantafyllidis, Lee Tusman, Elia Vargas, Emily Wick.

This book was designed by Natalie Sims. Buy here.

“An Ecology of Light Based Art” in The 3-D Additivist Cookbook (2016)

The 3D Additivist Cookbook, devised and edited by Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke, is a free compendium of imaginative, provocative works from over 100 world-leading artists, activists and theorists. The 3D Additivist Cookbook contains .obj and .stl files for the 3D printer, as well as critical and fictional texts, templates, recipes, (im)practical designs and methodologies for living in this most contradictory of times. Download here.

Living Room Light Exchange Publication No. 1 (May 2015)

The Living Room Light Exchange is a place. But, these pages are not a living room in Oakland or the Bay; they will travel. These pages will live on shelves and tables, add to stacks and make things taller. These pages have words and images, and carry ideas.

Contributors: Jeremiah Barber, Liat Berdugo, Kevin Chen, Paul Clipson, Christina Corfield, Robb Godshaw, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, James David Lee, Wei Li, Rose Linke, Chip Lord, Charlie Macquarie, Emily Martinez, Margaret McCarthy, Elisabeth Nicula, Nicholas O'Brien, Jenny Odell, Rebecca Ora, Andy Puls, Ingrid Rojas, Dorothy Santos, Tara Shi, Natalie Sims, Elia Vargas, and Joe Veix.

With immeasurable gratitude to Rose Linke, who joined us in making this publication a reality; Natalie Sims, our world-class designer and brilliant thinker; and to SoEx's Alternative Exposure grant, which brought the ink to these pages. Purchase here.

Exquisite Gardening: The Ecology of Culture

“A garden is a place for us to watch (and cultivate) the most fundamental processes of life. The cycles are fully remarkable: photosynthesis, water, the life cycle, bio-remediation, our body’s nutritional needs, aesthetics, olfactory and culinary exploration, and much more. Before our very eyes and with trowel in hand, we observe the transference of information, in genetic code, of energy consumption. We witness biomass transfer from one state to another, and afterwards we eat it. Recycling the process to begin again within our own bodies.”