Fifty Sisters

The 1940s saw the world’s petrochemical industry dominated by oil production in the Middle East and a cartel known as the Seven Sisters. Three decades later, during the Arab-Israeli war, an oil embargo was imposed against the United States. In an expression of political retaliation, Arab nations sought revenge against the US for arming the Israeli military.

In 2023, the world is expected to hit an all-time high demand for oil at $528 billion. Reliance is too gentle of a word. We are more than reliant upon this resource. We are shaped by its seduction, breathed by its byproducts. We are fueled by it, fed by it, and we wake up every day inside its haze, and we have to.

The five months in 2010 when BP oil spilled industriously and disastrously from the American coast into the Gulf of Mexico. Unprecedented damage. A cool couple hundred million gallons followed by a reactive protective response on behalf of the environment.

BP became a federal criminal, guilty of manslaughter. A felon. Banned, charged, monitored, penalized. Twenty billion dollars later, and some time, a lot of time, many people still shun the familiar BP brand. Big wounds need big time to heal.

Since 2022, 50 one-meter sized images of plant-like structures have been displayed in an art museum in Austria. The work is inspired by the visual elements of various oil company logos. Some of the artwork greets guests in a large entryway installation, others line the upstairs hallway. They’re engaging. Beautiful. Immersive. The fine print tells the audience that the images were born of algorithmic iterations programmed by the artist into a computer.

The first time a person used an external object to express something to others, they laid the first brick toward AI art - created, debated, and presented as such.

They are political, environmental, controversial and mesmerizing. Fifty computer-made, plant-like forms, grown from coded artificial evolution. Generatively. Bypass how. Focus on why.

A dozen years post-BP disaster, an AI artist recreates the contemporary cartel that survived and reproduced seven times over in a clash of beauty versus the beast of consumption. Fifty new brands to choose from.

The contrast is offensive. Natural beauty where unnatural greed grows. Five hundred twenty-eight billion dollars force spent on a resource that technology has surpassed.

Our best is not enough. We can do better.

Art makes us remember. Doesn’t let us forget. Stands meter by meter in rows of history, screaming injustice through code to get our attention. Maybe that’s what it takes. Zeros and ones typed against the grain we expect. Until we’re in Austria, staring at the AI art on the Ars Electronica Center walls, eye to eye with the artist’s vision of change. Algorithmic. Stepwise. Iterations of retaliation.

Beauty doesn’t erase the disaster, but its golden ratios demand the gaze and extend a hand to pull you up out of the hazy crud so you can see with new eyes this tale of gold and crime.