Crude Oil Futures

Kinetic Sculpture

2015

Crude Oil Futures is a kinetic sculpture consisting of a large black metal dish that makes short, randomized movements. The crude black oil inside the dish creates constantly changing, mesmerizing patterns and reflections on the ceiling.

Crude Oil Futures is part of the installation Cultivating Probability. Cultivating Probability is based on research into the way how people in different times and cultures try to predict and influence decision-making processes and the future paths of specific situations. The sculptural objects part of Cultivating Probability speculate and unite attitudes and rituals from different cultures and periods into a kind of fictional anthropological display.

ARTEFACT 2017, The Act of Magic, Leuven, BE. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

“These installations seem to transfer a ‘primitive’ magical indeterminacy into a modern industrial processing that includes chemicals, metals and electricity. A little drama is staged in any act of magic or divination: the future that is supposed to be written and read is disproportionally larger than what the magician-artist with her instruments can read. The magician-artist can imagine figures of the future and map them out – as Claude Levi-Strauss would say – like a miniature that compensates for the small-scale diagram by providing ‘intelligible dimensions’.” – from: ‘Decommissioned Truths Marjolijn Dijkman’s Cultivating Probability’ by Vlad Ionescu, 2017

Crude Oil Futures
Commissioned by: Global Imaginations, Museum de Lakenhal, University of Leiden and the Museum of World Cultures, Leiden, NL

Materials: pedestal, black painted metal dish, mechanics, black oil
Size: The diameter of the dish is 120 cm. by approx 25 cm. high

Crude Oil Futures with a reflection of the video ‘In Our Hands’.
ARTEFACT 2017, The Act of Magic, Leuven, BE. Photo: Kristof Vrancken
Installation at Global Imaginations, Leiden, NL (2015)