Bakken Boom Explored In Exhibit At MIT In Cambridge, MA -- Best Story Of The Day -- March 4, 2019

An excerpt from the linked story below, from a photojournalist/artist:

When I first saw fracking operations in North Dakota, it looked like surrealism in infrastructure.

The visual power of it was stunning. No one really knows what fracking looks like because it’s so politically sensitive that they mostly keep photographers out. If you looked up fracking on Google right now you’d see a picture of something else – an oil drilling derrick, something that’s been going on long enough that people have seen images of it.

In fracking, all these massive tubes look like giant octopi or sea creatures with men walking among them like weeds, tending them. It’s biblical. It’s very moving. Leave value judgements off for a moment. Fracking is part of our world. Why shouldn’t we see what it looks like? 

Wow, this is so cool. A reader sent me the link -- I would have completely missed it. MIT in Boston has an exhibit exploring the Bakken boom. The artist spent four years photographing and recording audio in the Bakken region of North Dakota, documenting the rise of the oil industry there and the large migration that went along with it.

From the oil rigs to the “man-camps” where workers live, artist Valery Lyman’s two-day power plant pop-up “Breaking Ground” looks unflinchingly at the landscape of American industry. In Lyman’s moving installation, centuries of boom and bust give way to new boomtowns and the latest technology; but while the infrastructure of extraction has changed, the optimism, hard labor, risk and loneliness are a constant over more than 200 years of the American experience. 

Photographs from Lyman’s work have been installed around the country and published by The [London] Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor in the past few years. The installation this week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology incorporates those images, along with audio from Lyman’s exploration of North Dakota from 2013 to 2016 – projected directly onto machinery throughout MIT’s Central Utilities Plant in Cambridge, making a singular art experience out of a plant providing electricity, steam heat and chilled water to more than 100 campus buildings.

Archived, because one just knows this article will disappear into the ether-net.