What does oil look like?

What does oil look like? is a screen performance of an April 2020 Business Insider article featuring visual descriptions contributed by oil and gas workers who make first contact when petroleum is drawn from the ground. This live video was performed for ¡HOT MESS! at Elastic Arts in Chicago with Cristóbal Valenzuela’s Generative Engine, an interactive real-time text to image generation tool which utilizes Tao Xu’s Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks (AttnGAN). It was later exhibited as a part of the group show Ground: Zero at Edge Zones Gallery in Miami. Music courtesy of Zirafa.