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 ...

Within mediated conditions, at some level everything becomes reduced to data. How do art practices collect data, circulate it, and themselves become data? How do artists and organizations reckon with the production and circulation of knowledge in increasingly online media environments? Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition examined how forms of digital storytelling, ethics, access, governance, and data sovereignty are being practiced in other disciplines. By looking at how media-makers across diverse fields are engaging with new technological tools and practices, The Mediatic Edition considered how these paradigms map onto artistic practice. In Back Up Your Data!, respondents to Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition reflect on new ...

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 twelfth SDUK broadsheet examines the diverse means by which individuals and communities build lasting or fleeting bonds. Coinciding with the conclusion of Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter, the Blackwood’s 2021–22 lightbox series, this issue, BONDING, echoes themes seen throughout Crossings: migration, diaspora, borders, and archives. Where the lightbox exhibitions examine image-making practices, this SDUK issue engages print culture in new and recurring formats including visual storytelling, poetry, a letter exchange, and a recipe. Food is the source of many enduring cultural bonds, and thus one might be tempted to start from the gut: See Diasporic Dumplings (p. 27) for a site-responsive ...

Take Care’s fifth circuit, Collective Welfare, glimpses typically sequestered and private spaces of care. The projects in this circuit juxtapose three sites of the institutional mediation of care: hospital, prison, hospice. These sites offer a reminder that the welfare state, in all its ambivalence, is a decisive front in the crisis of care. Reframing practices of individualized care as fundamentally social matters, this circuit works across video, photography, social media, and temporary architecture to bear witness to care’s pace, failure, and stratifications. Collective Welfare circulates images of the entanglement of the chronically ill body and the biomedical industrial complex; materially fabricates the incompatibility ...

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 ...

Correctional Service Canada Accommodation Guidelines: Mental Healthcare Facility is a sculptural artwork based on the Federal Correctional Facilities Accommodation Guidelines set by Correctional Service Canada (CSC). Obtained by the artist in 2015 via an access-to-information request, this 700-page document is used by CSC for the building, maintenance, and everyday operations of prisons. In a section titled “Mental Healthcare Facility,” CSC outlines the locations and spatial dimensions required for waiting rooms, bathrooms, and staff offices for prison mental healthcare wings. People with severe trauma and mental illnesses, due to a lack of resources for their care on the outside, are disproportionately imprisoned by CSC. Parallel ...

This ninth SDUK broadsheet openly engages the nineteenth-century society from which the series takes its name, by considering DIFFUSING: how circulation, dissemination, opacity, transparency, and anonymity shape the way knowledges, materials, and media are transferred. Whereas the original Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge circulated its publications through largely one-way and top-down means, contributors to this issue explore knowledge-sharing as a more open, non-hierarchical practice. One might be prompted by physical processes of diffusion to wonder: How does matter move through bodies, across borders, and into inter-relations? Sophia Jaworski and Zoë Wool (p. 8) offer a reappraisal of the 1979 ...

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 ...

Our fourteenth SDUK broadsheet, LINGERING, follows and complements WISH YOU WERE HERE, WISH HERE WAS BETTER, a mobile public event series presented by the Blackwood that made space “for people impacted by the ongoing overdose crisis—and its cascading systemic issues of precarity, houselessness, and criminalization—to mourn, while providing opportunities to imagine and work towards a more just future.” Throughout this broadsheet, contributors linger with these sociopolitical issues, among others. They navigate complex emotions like grief, joy, and mourning while developing vital forms of activism; celebrating disability and queerness; shaping institutions; or finding poetry in everyday life. But how do we “work ...