Crude Oil Futures

Crude Oil Futures is a kinetic sculpture of a large black metal dish making short, randomized movements. The crude black oil inside the dish creates constantly changing, mesmerizing patterns and reflections in the space.

Crude Oil Futures is inspired by one of the oldest divination techniques that involves observing patterns and shapes formed by oil drops, practiced by various cultures and religions, and possibly originated in ancient Mesopotamia.

The installation is part of  Cultivating Probability and is based on research into 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 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