Accumulation returns with six new contributions

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 twentieth 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 six new contributions that continue its exploration into the media and mediation of climate change.

Accumulation debuted in 2017 with contributions by Emily Apter, T.J. Demos, Robin Kelsey, Orit Halpern, McKenzie Wark, and Kathryn Yusoff on themes such as affectual infrastructure, accidential architecture, indigenous resistance, disaster urbanism, linguistic overburden, and material culpability.

Grounding this line of investigation in material realities, contributions by Nerea Calvillo, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Jennifer Gabrys, Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, Stephanie LeMenager, and Karen Pinkus and Hans Baumann  will explore forest fires, ice meltings, geothermal energies, statistical graphs, forest maps, and air toxicities.