Oil’d, by Chris Harmon

We’re often obsessed with oil. A year ago, the issue was off­shore drilling. The Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon rig had explod­ed, and crude oil was spilling into the Gulf of Mex­i­co at a rate of 53,000 bar­rels a day. We all watched help­less­ly as BP threw every­thing but the kitchen sink at the prob­lem. (Remem­ber the golf balls?) Three months passed and 4.9 mil­lion bar­rels ripped into the ecosys­tem before the well was final­ly capped. Time to talk about it? Hard­ly. Now the dis­cus­sion has moved on to sky­rock­et­ing oil prices and the issues sur­round­ing them, like the caus­es (con­flict in the Mid­dle East, ris­ing con­sump­tion in Chi­na and India, com­mod­i­ty spec­u­la­tion at home…) and the polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions for the 2012 U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion if gas prices stay high. Weighty issues, to be sure. But before we allow the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil spill of 2010 to fade into our col­lec­tive amne­sia, Chris Har­mon, a Brook­lyn-based design­er, ani­ma­tor and writer, has cre­at­ed a work of ani­mat­ed typog­ra­phy to put some of the stag­ger­ing facts into per­spec­tive.