Featuring Amanda Boetzkes and Jeff Diamanti, Ian Gray, Gökçe Günel, Hannah le Roux and Gabrielle Hecht, Nashin Mahtani, Anne McClintock, Kiel Moe, and Stephanie Wakefield
The climate is not the weather. Weather can be experienced, but to understand climate, media is necessary. As the computational capacity to manage meteorological data emerged in the middle of the 20th century, so did the means of visualizing and disseminating these new forms of complex information. Scientific knowledge of global and regional climate systems has developed through expressive, technical, and speculative images. Media provide access to processes of accumulation that are endemic to the contemporary socio-biotic condition of climate instability. If media do not precisely determine our situation, in the wake of Friedrich Kittler, they nonetheless provide access to the material and cultural outlines of possible futures.
The current epoch is one of accumulation: not only of capital (primitive or otherwise) but also of raw, often unruly material; from plastic in the ocean and carbon in the atmosphere to people, buildings and cities. Of anxiety, and of a recognition of the difficulty of finding effective means for intervening in the behaviors and practices that engender these patterns. Alongside these material accumulations, image making practices embedded within the disciplines of art and architecture have proven to be fertile, mobile and capacious. Images of accumulation help open up the climate to cultural inquiry and political mobilization.
Accumulation, a project by e-flux Architecture and Daniel A. Barber, is returning over the next three weeks with new contributions by Amanda Boetzkes and Jeff Diamanti, Ian Gray, Gökçe Günel, Hannah le Roux and Gabrielle Hecht, Nashin Mahtani, Anne McClintock, Kiel Moe, and Stephanie Wakefield that continue its exploration into the media and mediation of climate change.
Accumulation previously featured contributions by Emily Apter, Hans Baumann and Karen Pinkus, Nerea Calvillo, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, T.J. Demos, Jennifer Gabrys, Orit Halpern, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, Robin Kelsey, Stephanie LeMenager, McKenzie Wark, and Kathryn Yusoff.
Accumulation is sponsored by the PhD Program in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. Previous iterations of Accumulation have been produced in cooperation with the Princeton School of Architecture, the Princeton Environmental Institute, and the Speculative Life Lab at the Milieux Institute, Concordia University Montréal.
