Oxide 13 (2008)

Oxide 13 is a durational performance and object-based installation created by Iain Ball during his undergraduate studies at Oxford Brookes University. The process involved repeatedly driving a 130-mile round trip from Oxford to Michaelwood Services, a Welcome Break motorway station on the M5 in Southwest England. Upon arrival Ball would typically sit, drink a herbal tea, and eat a small bar of Green & Black’s Maya Gold chocolate before driving back, collecting the receipts each time. The action was undertaken alone, multiple times, as a lived crisis management exercise or existential strategy — questioning what is valuable, what is wasteful, and why do this.

The physical outcome consisted of thirteen plastic jars displayed in the Richard Hamilton Building: six containing baby octopi pickled in tequila with green food colouring, six containing the service station receipts, and one containing nothing. Framed as both durational performance and symbolic ornamentation, the work stages a deliberate, nihilistic exhaustion of resources — energy, time, fuel, money — as a cathartic episode against the architecture of advanced modernity.

A retrospective video documentation of the final trip was filmed in January 2009 and has been archived on-chain as part of the Iconoplasm X Live Trap NFT contract, alongside related documentation of the physical jars.