The Williston Time Capsule David Moses Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw, Readers: Arindam Dutta, Cristina ParreĂąo Alonso
This thesis is a time capsule of the oil economy, created by preserving everyday totems made from petroleum in a landscape that spatially recreates the processes of drilling and fracking a contemporary oil well. The site is an existing two square mile drill spacing unit on the edge of Williston, North Dakota, currently the site of one of the largest shale oil booms in the world. The project consists of two interrelated landscape systems. The first is an above ground landform made by pushing around dirt. The second is a labyrinth of subterranean chambers carved out of rock with precision excavation. The project is a counter monument to the otherwise hidden processes that create massive change on a vast territorial scale. By placing the products of oil back in their place of origin, they become future sites of meditation on the ways that everyday consumption
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drives economies of extraction. This preservation would take place over a long period of time: as objects and processes of the oil economy become obsolete, they would be entombed one by one, a century long slow motion fracking of the site. Like John Soane’s Bank of England project, this counter monument is designed for a future public, hopefully one that wonders at the strangeness of our contemporary ways of living, and our economies of seemingly mindless extraction and consumption. The thesis is a way of saying that we as a culture at least contended with fracking in a way that was more substantial than worrying about the price of gas at the pump. Underground chamber perspectives