This fifth SDUK broadsheet examines the multifaceted meanings of ACCOUNTING in the age of climate change. This issue considers accounting in its colloquial sense, pertaining to investment and economics, but also moves beyond the ledger book to consider what remains uncounted, and what is consciously left out. Throughout this issue, we find slippery concepts, things, and actors that pose a challenge to accounting as a means of representation and understanding. Beginning with economics, one might ask: What are the basic tools and assumptions on which accounting is based? In his ongoing unsettling of fundamental economic concepts, D.T. Cochrane looks at how ...

This SDUK broadsheet is the first to follow The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea, a ten-day contemporary art festival engaging with climate change, environmental crisis, and resilience which took place in Mississauga’s Southdown Industrial Area in September 2018. Taking BEARING as its theme, this issue turns our attention to alienation, affect, anxiety, and questions of responsibility and resilience. For curious readers of all persuasions—those new to the project and those who have been following its year-long unfurling—here are some places to begin: If you are wondering how can we enact responsibility to humans and nonhumans in bleak political and ecological ...

This SDUK broadsheet takes COMMUTING as its theme. Alongside the most familiar usage of “commuting” (moving to and from work), the contributions in this issue touch on many aspects of circulation, migration, and change that are flowing across and rumbling below the surface of the Earth. As this publication platform traces the diffusion of knowledge, this issue in particular explores the shifts, displacements, and movements we must consider in an age of rapid global change in order to commute the Earth’s death sentence. We know you open this broadsheet with many questions, interests, and curiosities already formed, so here are ...

This sixth broadsheet in the SDUK series rounds out a sustained engagement with climate change, environmental crisis, and resilience that has taken place across mul­tiple sites in Mississauga throughout 2018- 19. Concluding this series, though by no means ceasing the Blackwood’s work on climate justice, this issue reflects on how to reckon with, and move forward, in an age of ecological anxiety and accumulat­ing destruction—with hope, but also with urgency. As in the return of fire to land­ scape conservation documented in Zack­ery Hobler’s cover image, FORGING looks to artistic, poetic, political, and scientific catalysts to re-enliven suppressed or way­ ...

Inspired by discussions on radical imagination, Indigenous thought, collective intelligence, and plural ecology, Futurity Island invites participants to develop new habits of thought in this era of environmental crisis. It is a space to speculate on the usefulness of the concept of “sympoiesis” for imaging and working together in radical interdisciplinarity toward desirable futures. In the utopian regime, the moment of future is transformed into a representable topography of space. Future is a place—an island—a defined location that is better than ours. It is characterized both by separation and distanciation. The geography of a utopian island is manipulatable, as well as conceivable at ...

The SDUK broadsheet series takes aim at a broad range of concerns—and this issue, GRAFTING, explores how we come to know, define, and interact with nature, where we see its boundaries and identify its needs, and how we understand its entanglement with culture. Following on the origins of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and in the spirit of publishing, questioning, and problematizing “useful knowledge,” we recognize our readers as curious people who may pick up this publication with certain questions already in mind. Perhaps you are asking, “Where do nature and the city intersect? What does this mean ...

Although the worlds we inhabit are invariably composed of sensations and sense-makings, it is a peculiar challenge to perceive ourselves sensing. Because our human-centred sensory habits are so difficult to discern, we can often mistake them for natural tendencies. As an attunement to the aesthetics of sensation, the exhibition Logics of Sense—presented in two parts at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga—examines sense-in-the-making, from the surface of incorporeal events to a multiplicity of decentralized perceptions, and from itinerant geo-methodologies to the various disciplinary frames and frameworks that artistic intelligence retrofits for emergent social and political realities. Logics of Sense 1: Investigations (September ...

Although the worlds we inhabit are invariably composed of sensations and sense-makings, it is a peculiar challenge to perceive ourselves sensing. Because our human-centred sensory habits are so difficult to discern, we can often mistake them for natural tendencies. As an attunement to the aesthetics of sensation, the exhibition Logics of Sense—presented in two parts at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga—examines sense-in-the-making, from the surface of incorporeal events to a multiplicity of decentralized perceptions, and from itinerant geo-methodologies to the various disciplinary frames and frameworks that artistic intelligence retrofits for emergent social and political realities. Logics of Sense 2: Implications (October ...

This fourth broadsheet in the SDUK series is themed SHORING—a concept that touches on both literal shores (representing the meeting—or separation— of land and water), and broader representations of terraforming, resource extraction, data visualization, interdisciplinary research, and the many other supports that have held up existing infrastructures, exploitations, and innovations. A few questions might guide your encounter with this issue: Repeat readers of the broadsheet series may note that this issue in particular is saturated with images, and thus ask, how can we read images of our world through the lens of environmental justice? Projects in this issue demonstrate the ability ...

Examining nature symbolism, territorial resistance, and solidarity economies connected to land and water, two solo exhibitions by women artists trace the contours of embodiment and the agency of more-than-human worlds. Calgary-based Miruna Dragan’s When Either But Not Both Are True explores the limits of human comprehension alongside material manifestations of the unknown, the underground, and the under-worldly. Exploring dreaming, divination, energy economies, and logic systems, the project engages human relationships with the natural world in order to question our interactions with the physical spaces we inhabit. Those at the Great River-Mouth is based on Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo’s investigation of hydroelectric sites across Latin ...