Oil and water do not mix. Our biosphere and bodies require water; the Anthropocene as we know it continues to thirst for oil. Can the accelerating breakdown of global climate systems be understood through the lens of this elemental incompatibility?

Originally commissioned by Refraction's R-AV club as an audio-visual release, the three mixes presented here were constructed with custom sonification tools developed by Pred in Max/MSP. Nearly all musical components of the piece are generated from data sets exploring the impact of petroleum on our waterways and ice caps, access to drinking water, hydropower usage, and the price of crude oil (all additional sounds not sonified from data were made from recordings of interactions between petroleum-based plastics and water).

The goal was not to translate these data points in a literal way, but to use them as starting points for creative exploration. If data is the new oil, can it fuel creativity - not just capture profit? Aside from the biases so often inherent in its collection, data tends to be corrupted in its expression, collapsing reality into abstraction. Composing with arbitrary musical outputs generated from these data sets reflects the dubious nature of much contemporary data usage.