Energy Images

Energy Images: Aesthetics of Resemblance and Form

explores how visual representations of future oil and gas resources shape energy policy, investment decisions, and public understanding.

Drawing on ethnographic research and visual analysis, the book shows how planners and corporations rely on abstract maps, models, and data visualizations to manage uncertainty and project authority, turning speculative futures into seemingly reliable objects of governance. The book extends the author’s previous investigation into how expertise, perception, and power operate across contemporary energy systems and introduces two aesthetic regimes – resemblance and form. Resemblance organizes perception through proximity and surface similarity, grounding energy in embodied experience and causal links between production and consumption. Form, by contrast, operates through distance and abstraction, transforming infrastructures into patterns, diagrams, and branded images that invite interpretation rather than recognition. Together, these insights reveal how aesthetics function as a central force in energy politics.

This book will appeal to scholars in energy studies, anthropology, governance, and environmental humanities.

Dr. Arthur Mason’s Routledge trilogy Inside the Energy Salon (2024–2026) explores how expert performance and curated interactions shape global energy governance. The trilogy develops an “anthropology of surfaces” arguing that the visual and social staging of expertise – rather than data alone – is what makes energy futures appear investable and morally persuasive to political and industry elites. It features the following books:

Energy Capitol: The Waning of Regulatory Form (2024)

Consulting Energy: From Judgment to Decision-Making (2025)

Energy Images: Aesthetics of Resemblance and Form (2026)