Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change brings together essays published in the first three editions of Accumulation, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and Daniel A. Barber. To celebrate its release and at the same time herald future editions of the project, we are publishing a new essay by Anne McClintock, “Ghost Forest: Atlas of a Drowning World,” which can be read here.
The current epoch is one of accumulation: not only of capital but also of raw, often unruly material; from plastic in the ocean and carbon in the atmosphere to people, buildings, and cities. Alongside this material growth, image-making practices embedded within the fields 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 and have formed a cultural infrastructure focused on the relationship between humans, other species and their environments.
The essays in Accumulation dwell on this cultural infrastructure and the methodological challenges of its analysis. In doing so, they offer a response to the relative invisibility of the climate now seen as material manifestations of social behavior. Contributors outline opportunities and ambitions of visual scholarship as a means to encounter the challenges emergent in the current epoch: how can climate become visible, culturally and politically? Knowledge of climatic instability can change collective behavior and can offer other trajectories, other counter-accumulations that draw the present into a different, more livable, future.
Contributors: Emily Apter, Hans Baumann, Amanda Boeztkes, Dominic Boyer, Lindsay Bremner, Nerea Calvillo, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Beth Cullen, TJ Demos, Jeff Diamanti, Jennifer Ferng, Jennifer Gabrys, Ian Gray, Gokce Gunel, Orit Halpern, Gabrielle Hecht, Cymene Howe, Robin Kelsey, Bruno Latour, Hanna le Roux, Stephanie LeManeger, Nashin Mahtani, Kiel Moe, Karen Pinkus, Stephanie Wakefield, McKenzie Wark, Kathryn Yusoff.
Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change
Nick Axel, Daniel A. Barber, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anton Vidokle, editors
Series cover design: Liam Gillick
Book design: Noah Venezi
Printed and distributed by the University of Minnesota Press
30.00 USD paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1151-5
120.00 USD cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-1150-8
272 pages, 11 b&w photos, 7 x 10, February 2022
