Oil Standard

"Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator. His work traces the lines of political and symbolic power online, working on the Internet in order to comment on and or intercede in the real flows of information.

Oil Standard is a web browser plug-in that converts all prices from U.S. Dollars into the equivalent value in barrels of crude oil. When you load a web page, the script seamlessly inserts converted prices into the page. As the cost of oil fluctuates on the commodities exchange, prices rise and fall in real-time.

Seeing the cost in oil of a new iPod on Amazon.com, or the balance in your bank account is startling. More than just a play on the concept of the 'Gold Standard,' or the old 'Standard Oil' company, this is a glimpse into the moment when oil will replace (or already replaced) gold as the standard by which we trade all other goods and currencies.

The script is written in Greasemonkey, an official extension for Mozilla Firefox that allows the user to change the look, content, or function of a webpage, by writing client side DHTML into a page. Greasemonkey has primarily been used for very functional tasks: nytimes.com ad blockers, eBay.com auto-sign-in scripts, etc. Oil Standard adds some functional absurdity to the mix.

Review: March 20, 2006, Artist's Oily Alchemy:

If, in contemporary economics, the gold standard is no longer a viable model, users of Michael Mandiberg's new browser plug-in may believe that oil is the new currency par excellence. The American artist's Oil Standard seamlessly 'converts all prices from U.S. Dollars into the equivalent value in barrels of crude oil,' on webpages. These values are updated in real time, according to the fluctuating price of oil on the commodities exchange, so that one always knows the relative cost of that new iPod or weekend getaway. As is typical of the artist who digitized Sherry Levine's After Walker Evans series to bring internet users the After Sherry Levine project, Oil Standard is rife with ironic references. The concatenation of the gold standard, the Standard Oil company, and the project's title, in his personal statement, kick-starts the wordplay that makes Mandiberg's choice to write his project in the oily-sounding Greasemonkey Mozilla Firefox script all the more witty. And perhaps it does take a sense of humor to contemplate the crude equivalent of one's weekly lunch allowance in oil, considering the effect that this new currency is having on current affairs. - Marisa Olson, Net Art News, Rhizome.org" -- from Turbulence