Artist Talk with Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter.

This conversation was moderated by Vicky Googasian, Georgetown University in Qatar.

I Can Only See Shadows is a three-channel video set in a troposphere awash in the byproducts of drilling, digging, fracking, cracking, and burning carbon-based fuels. Clouds of dusty molecules increasingly fill the air, irritating the nose and clogging particle filters: material records of energy histories. Weaving together narratives provided by artists, anthropologists, researchers in the “energy humanities,” and environmental activists, the video projects a parallel world where liquid fossil fuels have been replaced by a new, dominant global energy source: untethered carbon particulate, which doubles as a medium for communication. The sparsely populated world, slowed by the sleepily violent interference of dust, envisions new forms of neoliberal labor where tiny particles are captured, scrutinized, and collected as data. Amidst such an atmosphere, what new modes of resistance and interference might become possible or necessary?

I Can Only See Shadows was originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (US) for the exhibition Petcoke: Tracking Dirty Energy (2016) and was produced with contributions by ︎alejandro t. acierto, ︎Jacquelene Drinkall, ︎Liz Ensz, Cameron Hu, Adam Mansour, Juan Luis Olvera, Patrick Quilao, ︎Smart Air (Beijing, CN), and the Southeast Environmental Task Force (Chicago, US).