Digital Deepwater Imaginaries in Brenda Longfellow's Offshore

This essay draws together digital humanities, science and technology studies, and energy culture to theorize the extractive site of the offshore in contemporary digital media. Elaborating on anthropological research that emphasizes the offshore industry's modularity, this essay turns to filmmaker Brenda Longfellow's interactive digital feature Offshore (2012) to examine how immersive user-guided media disrupt the modular logic of deepwater extraction. I argue that the postapocalyptic aesthetic of Offshore, set in an abandoned deepwater platform, works in concert with the text's interactive form to install affects of ambivalence, anxiety, and uncertainty that unsettle the habitus of tough-oil culture.