Petro-Time

Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. As an interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities, media studies, and visual culture, she is interested in how the saturation of fossil fuels has shaped contemporary culture. Her forthcoming book, Plastic Matter, argues that plastic is the emblematic material of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how intimately oil has coated nearly every fabric of being, how the synthetic cannot be disentangled from the natural, and how a generalized toxicity is producing queer realities. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017).

In 1948, Hermann Muller coined the term ‘time bomb’ to describe chemical and nuclear fallout that kills ‘more in the future’ than when the bomb explodes. This metaphor could be aptly applied to the implications of climate change and petrochemical saturation. Exploring the various relations of time to fossil fuels, this project examines how time is not what it once was. Seasons happen at the wrong time; species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate. In Western modernity, time is normatively framed in progressive, linear terms, but these measures are increasingly incommensurate and insufficient to understanding the ways that time speeds, collides, drags, and appears asynchronously. To theorize these new realities, entwined as they are with fossil fuels, Heather puts forward the concept of petro-time. Petro-time asserts that time itself has been compressed through millennia to become fossil fuels, and then burned, resulting in climate chaos. Petro-time describes the waiting, foreboding times of impending climate disaster, the experiences of climate refugees, and the sped-up times of raging fires. Plumbing the complexities of the future, Petro-time asks what the future means, and for whom.