Creator’s Statement

“Timeline Dripping” interrogates the contradictory aesthetics of oil using music videos and footage of oil-spill catastrophes. It examines how the same raw material—petroleum— appears in our lives through experiences that are at once seductive and catastrophic, as well as explores how the videoessay can be a powerful medium to do ecocritical work in general and to engage with the contradictions of petromodernity in particular.

Given the ubiquity and malleability of oil, I turn to music videos as part of the digital media ecology that saturates our lives. As a widely popular format, the disjointed nature of music videos makes them especially apt for expressing the complex and shifting affects that constantly circulate across our screens. The formal plasticity of music videos links them to the ecocritical potential of the videoessay: both media often construct non-hierarchical, associative combinations of ideas, generating a constant process of becoming in which meaning emerges from the clash of images and sounds. This way, discontinuity, affect intensity, and tension between ideas are privileged over linear narrative coherence. This disjunctive quality resonates with the paradoxical nature of the current environmental crisis, in which causes and effects are not easily traceable, and where many of us in the Western world live within deep contradictions between the pleasure and comfort brought by our everyday actions and the awareness of their dark implications.

This concept—disjunction—is central to the third chapter of my dissertation, Videographic Ecocriticism: Environment and Affect in Iberian Moving Images (2025), and I also made it the focus of my work in the Reframing the Argument workshop. The series of exercises and discussions led by Ariel Avissar, Colleen Laird, Matthew Payne, and Barbara Zecchi allowed me to explore the concept through different phases. From the very first exercise, when we were asked to choose a word and an image from our object of study, I turned to the rupture and paradoxical logic of disjunction. I draw on Laura Rascaroli’s (2014) work on the essay film, which, informed by Gilles Deleuze’s ideas, conceives of the form as thinking through gaps, moments where meaning emerges from the viewer’s active process of making sense. My aim in the workshop was to experiment with how I might represent this same concept of the interstice audiovisually, by extending and distorting raw materials that differ in nature, meaning, and tone in order to intensify fracture and to open breaches of meaning. In doing so, I attempted to show how the videoessay can serve as a medium for tracing the ways oil cuts across time and space and embodies radically opposed affects. Both music videos and videoessays disrupt linear narrative logics, privileging instead juxtapositions across temporalities, spaces, and affects. In my process, I employ the (video)essayistic method of disjunction by colliding images, sounds, and ideas. It is from these disruptive collisions that interstices emerge, offering a space to examine the contradictory aesthetics of oil. For instance, my use of Rosalía’s video SAOKO (2022) foregrounds one of the material manifestations of oil: motorcycles. Here motorcycles function as coded vehicles of freedom, sexualization, and speed, giving way to what I coined as petropostfeminism, “a mode of empowerment rooted in independence and self-assertion, yet entangled with practices and ideologies born of extractivism and domination—values that ultimately contradict feminist ethics” (Sainz 2025: 201). Rosalía’s album Motomami elaborates a cyborg-like persona full of contradictions—aggressive yet soft, cute yet fierce, feminine yet masculine—that resonates with the core of petroculture’s reckless hedonism, what Frederick Buell describes as an “exuberance” perpetually “haunted by catastrophe” (2014: 71).

Since my project is as much about conveying the paradoxical nature of oil as it is about exploring the videoessay’s potential as an ecocritical tool, the process of material thinking became key. Throughout the workshop exercises, I continually asked: How can I represent the interstice visually and sonically? How might I create disjunction—formally through editing and affectively in relation to petromodernity? How can the essayistic form of videograpic criticism grapple with the entanglement of pleasure and destruction at the heart of this logic? These questions are especially critical given the representational challenges posed by oil, which Rob Nixon’s (2011) well-known concept of “slow violence” articulates and what Amitav Ghosh (1992) terms “the Oil Encounter,” where he laments literature’s inability to capture the elusive nature of petroleum. My question, then, is: can the videoessay form make sense of it? By overlapping clips, layering sounds, and juxtaposing footage, I was not only representing disjunction but also producing interstices—gaps where meaning emerges.

To create an audiovisual account of the interstice and the disjunctive nature of petromodernity—one that conveyed both its disruptive force and its malleability, its “viscous porosity” in Jane Bennett’s terms (2010)—I experimented with several strategies, struggling at first to find what could serve as the grammar of my video. I turned to the multiscreen as a primary device, enabling me to stage different moments in time and space through which oil could literally spill. The first image I constructed was that of the Deepwater Horizon spill (2010), which I overlapped with footage of the Prestige sinking (2002), arranged as horizontal clips flowing over the bursting petroleum. To make visible the spaces generated between these temporally and spatially distant events—the interstices—I separated the clips with thin intervals, allowing the oil to seep through behind the images of the sinking ship. I also added movement and malleability to some layers, suggesting that these intersections are pouring over, merging into each other, and continually shifting. These in-between spaces allowed me to express the interstitial condition itself, the zone where new meanings come forward. This was the conceptual seed of the video: to convey, audiovisually and affectively, the interstice and the contradictory nature of oil.

The collage-like language of the videoessay—and of the music video, since it often features a fractured timeline of events, spaces and moments—allowed me to conceptualize the interstice both horizontally and vertically, that is, across temporal and spatial dimensions. Temporally, one of my strategies was to juxtapose clips in ways that would produce stark contrasts. I began with images of Shakira in La tortura (2009) intertwined with images and sounds of Rosalía and Tokischa’s LINDA (2022) to establish an initial tone. I increasingly distorted the audiovisual material, accelerating the rhythm until the images begin to merge with one another. The first sequence ends with a juxtaposition of oil drenching Rosalía’s image, exposing ruptures within what initially appears as a coherent image. I present the translated lyrics of the song—while respecting its original Spanglish in order to highlight its globalized nature—drawing attention to the song’s affective underpinnings. The lyrics are posed alongside the hedonic pleasure displayed by the images and music as they gradually fracture, ultimately disrupted by introducing the two oil spills of the Prestige and Deepwater Horizon. The interplay of scenes, shifting not only in footage but also in pace, music, and affect, became one of the key ways I generated this disjunctive effect in my video.

Moreover, I aimed to express disjunction vertically as well with several layers over the same image. Working with distortion became a way of experimenting with effects to see what new meanings might emerge. In this sense, interstices also appeared within a single image, as when I blurred elements of a clip to inject different layers of meaning. For instance, this can be seen when I distort the footage of volunteers cleaning crude oil from the sea with a filter that transformed them into abstract figures, dots within a sea of oil, between which I inserted words: another layered way of exploring the networks of meaning and material forces that traverse petroleum. The font I employed throughout the piece also changes to differentiate the varied dimensions of the video, marking the respective affective potential of the different sources: for the music videos, I used one that connects with their overflowing playfulness; for the transcriptions and translations of the catastrophes, a clearer and larger font; and for my own additions, a thinner one that can seep through the images, creating clear distinctions between the three.

Finally, working with the timeline—placing clips side by side and layering them one over another—gave me the idea of stepping back from the screen to reflect on the entire process. I realized that the timeline itself, with its building blocks, was already producing interstices, and that manipulating the clips was part of my exploration, so I wanted to find a way for oil to literally seep into the gaps I was creating. From there, I sought to take the process to a meta-level, turning the act of editing into a reflection on my own creative work. I wanted the material of the video to drip over itself, and later, with Dayna McLeod’s suggestion, I achieved this effect through a cloning tool combined with footage of paint dripping.

The scaffolding nature of the workshop allowed me to break down the process of developing my argument and to explore different strategies for conveying my ideas. From beginning with a single word, to recreating an idea through images alone, to animating words to construct the paradoxical notions of destruction and allure that inform my research, each exercise pushed me to reflect not only on my concepts but also on the very act of making videoessays. Sometimes, more than through my own work, this was achieved through sharing and looking at other people’s projects. This reflection helped me recognize the potential of videographic language in conducting ideas in ways I had not explored before. I aimed to engage with the creation of ruptures, not only to convey an argument but also to put into practice core ideas from my dissertation on the ecocritical potential of the videoessay. Working with images and sounds then became critical as a means of connecting seemingly disconnected events and revealing the environmental damage that underpins them, along with the contemporary networks of cause and effect in which they are embedded.

References

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

Buell, F. (2014). A Short History of Oil Cultures; or, The Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance. In R. Barrett & D. Worden (eds.), Oil Culture (pp. 69–90). University of Minnesota Press.

Ghosh, A. (1992). “Petrofiction.” New Republic, 206(9), 29–34.

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.

Rascaroli, L. (2014). How the Essay Film Thinks. Oxford University Press.

Sainz, C. (2025). Videographic Ecocriticism: Environment and Affect in Iberian Moving Images (Doctoral dissertation). University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Biography

Celia Sainz (she/her/ella, PhD 2025, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Visiting Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke College) explores the representational challenges of the ecological crisis through “videographic ecocriticism,” working with film and music videos to examine less explored, ambivalent feelings tied to climate collapse, from malaise induced by rising temperatures to the pervasive pleasures of petroculture. Her work has appeared in [in]Transition and Feminist Media Histories and was recognized in Sight and Sound’s “Best Video Essay” poll (2021) and “Emerging Voices” list (2024). She was trained at Middlebury College’s Workshop in Videographic Criticism as part of the 2023 cohort and returned as an instructor in 2025. Celia is the editor of the videoessay section of the peer-reviewed journal Teknokultura and has contributed to film curation across festivals.

Review by Jennifer Barker, Georgia State University

Sainz’s essay stages a visual and rhythmic friction between two ubiquitous forms—documentary footage of largescale oil disasters and pop music videos—to reveal the material entanglements among extractivist capitalism, musicvideo aesthetics, and videographic criticism. Her piece foregrounds the seductive and destructive aspects of petroculture, suggesting that videoessays can be a “powerful medium to engage with the contradictions of petromodernity.” The essay highlights disjunction; in doing so, it also draws out surprising affinities between oil extraction, music video, and videographic practice. The stunning effects Sainz creates—oil seeming to drip down the editing timeline, a histogram’s curves evoking human gestures—are a pleasure to watch and make for an engaging critique of petroculture.

These effects also call up the petrochemical substrate of the tools that make such an essay possible: the hard drive, screen, mouse, keyboard, pixels, circuitry, and network cables are all, in one way or another, indebted to oil. Words we might use to describe her workflow—“unearthing” footage, “importing” it, “extracting,” “processing,” “rendering,” “refining,” “transforming,” and “exporting” images—echo the lexicon of oil culture. Videographic essays may be ideally suited to the critique of petroculture precisely because they are steeped in it.

That productive tension, fully on display here, is central to Sainz’s argument, but only while exploring the lyrics of her chosen videos did I realize just how deeply oil might be said to saturate videographic criticism. In “SAOKO,” for example, Rosalía sings

I’m very much me, I transform

A butterfly, I transform

Drag queen makeup, I transform

Shooting star, I transform

Going overboard, I transform

Like Sex Siren, I transform

I contradict myself, I transform

I’m everything, I transform

(English translation: Genius.com)

This mantra evokes Sainz’s point about “the ubiquity and malleability of oil”: in these music videos it takes the form of gasoline, motorcycles, asphalt, greasepaint, fashion, and the machinery of media production, for example. The lyrics also underscore the transformative work of videographic criticism and of Sainz’s own approach to the medium. At times she foregrounds the editing process with eye-catching effects; just as often, though, her manipulation of image and sound operates at such a fine-grained level that I couldn’t begin to identify what’s technically happening—yet I feel it. In her search for a mode of “material thinking” in videographic form, Sainz has struck a rich vein.

Review by Annette Davison, University of Edinburgh

Speed, sex, desire, hedonism, abandon, oil. “Timeline Dripping” begins by fuelling the (audio-)viewer with the music of genre-blurring pop artist Rosalía and her collaborators. A visual cacophony of barely-there shots flaunt choreographed/cinematographed sexualised desire for cars and motorbikes, extracted from music videos, and driven by sped up and disrupted dembow rhythms. Sensual close-ups of glutinous oil dripping from Shakira’s hands, and the snaking of her oil-smeared torso interject, a juxtaposition from which murkier possibilities emerge as black, black oil oozes down the frame. Above layers and loops of music, the persistent repetition of palmas rhythms afford [contradictory?] interpretations of what we see. Does Rosalía’s open mouth and thrown back head, its motion slowed drastically, express joy or scream in distress? The track stops.

The pace in the second part is slower. Footage from the Deepwater Horizon and the Prestige tanker disasters is combined with audio recordings that document different registers of power: voices of testimony in juxtaposition with hegemonic voices that deny the threat posed by the tanker. Spare text appears in interstices generated by holding these images apart. Oil billows upwards from the ocean floor as though a cloud, fire surges, and semi-solid clumps of crude oil are lifted from a beach by figures in protective suits. The segment points to petro-capitalism as a key cause of Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” and its amplification through denial and inaction.

In the third part, Sainz asks how we might “confront our own embeddedness in the messy, dispersed, and contradictory affects” of what Stephanie LeMenager calls “loving oil” (2014:66). Familiar images return but are here layered, flipped, slowed, coloured, becoming unfamiliar/defamiliarized. Oil is no longer an intermittent interjection: it seeps through/over everything. Rosalía’s “Motomami” undergirds the sequence, but its energy is fragmented, its rhythms are slowed, pitch lowered, life drained; a sonic embodiment of “petro-melancholia” (2014:102)? The journey is almost over.

Zooming out, Sainz reveals that “Timeline Dripping” has been constructed (with blocks connected by interstices) in Premiere; a self-reflexive swerve that seeks to understand the format as a means to think through gaps, affording meaning making to the (audio-)viewer. The music stops.

“Timeline Dripping” rewards re-viewing. Its audiovisual structure is key to its success. It offers an attempt to experience dialectical thinking in audiovisual terms; it resonates with the idea of the “contrapuntal use of sound” proposed by Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov in their “Statement on Sound” (1928). The dialectical organisation of audio and video, of images and Sainz’s powerful use of music, sound, and voice hold in tension the embodiment of both the pleasures and dread of loving oil.

Reference

LeMenager, S. (2014). Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford University Press.

Licensing

CC by 4.0

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.