Excerpts of The Tome of Light

Elia Vargas is an Oakland, California-based artist and scholar. He works across multiple mediums, ranging from video and sound to writing and performance, focused on nature-cultural media practices. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the co-founder and co-curator of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly salon on critical, intersectional perspectives of art and technology. His current work considers the cultural, philosophical, and techno-scientific conditions of the early American oil industry and argues for refiguring crude oil as media to decentre anthropocentric representations of nature.