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 ...

The notion of artificial intelligence may seem distant and abstract, but AI is already pervasive in our daily lives. Anatomy of an AI System analyzes the vast networks that underpin the “birth, life, and death” of a single Amazon Echo smart speaker, painstakingly compiling and condensing this huge volume of information into a detailed high-resolution diagram. This data visualization provides insights into the massive quantity of resources involved in the production, distribution, and disposal of the speaker.

At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions of human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Nonetheless, they are inscribing and building those assumptions into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed. We offer up this exploded view map and essay as one way to begin seeing across a ...

Research regarding the significance and consequence of anthropogenic transformations of the earth’s land, oceans, biosphere and climate have demonstrated that, from a wide variety of perspectives, it is very likely that humans have initiated a new geological epoch, their own. First labeled the Anthropocene by the chemist Paul Crutzen, the consideration of the merits of the Anthropocene thesis by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences has also garnered the attention of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars, as well as an increasing number of researchers from a range of scientific backgrounds. Architecture in the Anthropocene: ...

Initiated by visual artist, researcher and amateur plant breeder Åsa Sonjasdotter, in collaboration with practitioners of cultivation, the project Peace with the Earth – Tracing Agricultural Memory, Refiguring Practice revisits histories of agriculture. It investigates soil, habitat and dwelling histories, in order to challenge and transform long-established cultural narratives of cultivation and ecological thinking.

Taking as its premise that the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this collection explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis. Art in the Anthropocene brings together a multitude of disciplinary conversations, drawing together artists, curators, scientists, theorists and activists to address the geological reformation of the human species. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez ...

Previous episodes have focused on certain measures of conservation in fisheries, such as Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY), which were historically put in place to protect domestic industries rather than fish populations. These measures often reinforce legacies of pelagic extraction. This episode focuses on the situation from the perspective of Ghanian artisanal fisherfolk. Their testimonies are in conversation with Dr Epifania Amoo-Adare, an artist, ‘renegade’ architect, pedagogue and researcher based in Accra (Ghana) who is currently engaged in what she describes as the “art of unthinking.” In this episode, we join Amoo-Adare in the art of unthinking, where the very idea ...

“We are post-purity,” observes Arushi Vats, a Delhi-based writer and inaugural fellow of the Momus/Eyebeam Critical Writing Fellowship. Rooted in field research and expanded through poetics, Vat’s text Exit the Rehearsal: A Body in Delhi, published by Runway Journal, is a precise yet capacious meditation on our “epoch of waste”— ecocide, legacy waste, and the Anthropocene in which Vats suggests that what we waste is “highly proximate, right under your skin, in your gut, and there is something radical in accepting that this is a part of your lifecycle.” In this interview with Lauren Wetmore, Vats discusses building a text ...

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 ...

Dorian visits the stream to investigate gay frogs.