Alexandra Vorobyeva
The Voice of Oil

What does oil mean for the average person? An abstract phenomenon that affects the dollar–ruble exchange rate? A substance that gives certain people a decently-paid job? A viscous black liquid that leaks out into the sea, polluting the planet?

What does oil mean for a chemist? A set of data? A subject of research? Or perhaps that same phenomenon that drives the economy?

The Voice of Oil is an interactive installation consisting of a set of thirty laboratory flasks, each containing a sample of oil. The samples all differ in colour, density, and viscosity. The flasks can be placed on a special stand: once a sample is in place, the installation reads off data about it and responds by transforming unseen values into a musical gesture.

This work encourages us to step beyond our abstract understanding of oil as a raw material and economic force and see it as having a personality in its own right. While for a chemist oil is a set of characteristics and spectral data, and for the average person a black liquid and a news item, here each sample is given its own voice. Each oil sample’s chemical composition, its content of paraffin and rare porphyrin complexes, is transformed into intonation, timbre, and rhythm.

The installation is grounded in analytical data on viscosity, density, infrared spectra, and other parameters, but presents this data in sensory form. The viewer is encouraged to experiment: set down one sample as a soloist, and gather together a choir of several flasks to accompany it. As a result, scientific characterizations and emotional perception converge, allowing us to hear what usually lies outside of our everyday notion of oil as a substance.