Petro-landscapes and Political Imagination: Interview with Steve Rowell

Steve Rowell is an artist who works with photography, moving image, sound, archives, and maps. His practice investigates terrains of perception, nonhuman intelligence, extinction, and technology, exploring the landscape as a site of political imagination. Steve contextualizes the morphology of the built environment with the surrounding medium of Nature, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist. His work has been exhibited internationally at a range of galleries and museums, including MoMA PS1, LACMA, the MCA in Chicago, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. From 2001 to 2013, Steve collaborated with the Center for Land Use Interpretation. He is a MacDowell and Guggenheim fellow.

Emily Roehl is an energy humanities scholar and artist whose work has recently appeared in Environmental History, Southern Cultures, and Jump Cut. Over the past few years, she has collaborated on a series of publications and events on energy justice, place-based research-creation, and lower-carbon research methods. Her collaborative project (with Sage Gerson and the graduate students of the Sawyer Seminar at UCSB) on the history of oil in Santa Barbara is forthcoming from Media+Environment. Roehl is an Assistant Professor of English and Journalism at Augustana University and the co-founder of artist book publisher Mystery Spot Books.