TRANSMISSION ART ARCHIVE

Telephone Hills

Charlie Macquarie

Telephone Hills is a project recording and documenting the radio communications and infrastructures of the oil industry in California, especially on Ohlone, Chumash, and Yokuts land, and remixing this documentation into new visual and aural transmissions that grapple with a future alongside climate change. As international environmental criminals and primary drivers of anthropogenic climate change, what the industry “says” across the radio waves is of great concern for bearing witness to the environmental and climate havoc they have wrought. Crucially, this work is focused on hearing from oil workers – the people risking their lives and their health out in the field while corporate profits pile up. The radio transmissions of these workers are important as another kind of witnessing and documentation – listening to the voices of the people who are needed for the dismantling of the industry and its infrastructure and for a just transition away from fossil fuels. Their voices blend with Macquarie’s own techno-genealogy into a poetic vision of energy transition on a warming planet.