Animation | Video
Deplete Me is a parodied music video, which focuses on the topic of petroleum production, consumption and future depletion. The work incorporates music that is written, recorded, and performed by the "Petroleum Pop Princess Baroness Mistress," Kristen Baumlier. This collaborative piece combines animation, video, and recordings from a live performance to create a tongue-in-cheek work that falls somewhere on the line between a music video and experimental video art/animation. Amanda Almon’s special effects and video/animation create a highly textured and multi-layered space from which to experience the satirical play of the “Petroleum Pop Princess Baroness Mistress” autobiographical and iconographic message.
Baumliér exists within the virtual frame as the unknown “Pop Princess Baroness Mistress” icon, who parades and dances near oil wells, holds kerosene lamps, and exudes “energy” which attempts to question her audience on their consumption practices and materialistic values. The music video hopes to foreshadow the future of oil consumption for new and current generations, a video which is tangible and accessible to international pop and consumer cultures of media. The song’s lyrics are provocative and include phrases such as “The tank is full tonight, my tennis shoes untied, come on let’s dig the well – deplete me tonight.”
Moving images of actual gasoline, crude oil, and kerosene are incorporated into the work, which symbolically represent the core substance of industrial and commercial dependence. A portion of the video was filmed onsite at Drake’s Well, in Titusville, PA, in the United States; the site of the first commercial oil well in American history. The power of the first commercial oil well image generates the conceptual framework and provides a strong symbol for oil capitalism and the power of fuel consumerism in America. By combining site-specific locations with moving images of unrefined crude oil, the importance of its substance, location and concept -- create a factual depiction in a parodied pop music frame.
Deplete Me is the second collaborative work by Almon and Baumliér.