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 is a project by e-flux Architecture and Daniel A. Barber produced in cooperation with the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University, the Speculative Life Lab at the Milieux Institute, Concordia University Montréal, the Princeton School of Architecture, and the PhD Program in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.

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24 essays
The ground is all memoranda and signatures and many objects covered over with hints. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Ghost: Mark me! —William Shakesp...
In 1963, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (1959–1990) called Singapore a “society in transition,” pushing the country on an upwards trajectory toward...
Lindsay Bremner and Beth Cullen
In Yangon, Myanmar, displays of conspicuous wealth adorn high-end real estate developments located at strategic downtown intersections and clustered a...
Researchers, activists, and citizens are speaking more and more about “getting away from the system of production.” The goal is no longer simply t...
Amanda Boetzkes and Jeff Diamanti
I. Moraine (Kangerlussuaq, Greenland) Delayed in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, we stand at the moraine of the Greenland Ice Sheet. We are a short dista...
Buildings are primarily characterized in the discipline of architecture as objects. The composition of a building, for example, is what emphatically m...
Gökçe Günel
“If you’re in trouble, you don’t think straight,” Ibrahim, an electrical engineer with the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) described Ghana...
Just as the fear of hell drives the marketing schemes of paradise, so too does the desire of paradise fuel the schemes of hell. —Anna Tsing1 ...
Stephanie Wakefield
Precarious Entanglement In the Anthropocene—the current terminal period of neoliberal capitalism marked by climate change, environmental degradat...
Ian Gray
The insurance industry is an influential consolidator of knowledge about risk. Accident after accident and plague following plague, insurers earn thei...
Hannah le Roux and Gabrielle Hecht
Every year, humans move more earth, and more rock. More than what rivers carry with them as they rush to oceans and lakes. More than what is eroded by...
Nerea Calvillo
The air is a space, an object, a threat, a myth, a weapon, a common. While it might have once been forgotten, as feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray cl...
Jennifer Gabrys
The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak1 Being human is a praxis. —Sylvia Wynter2 Multiple imag...
Hans Baumann and Karen Pinkus
Geothermal heat is foundational to the planet Earth, but its distribution is uneven. In Iceland or along the “Ring of Fire” in the Pacific, heat l...
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
What role do—and should—images play in combatting global climate change? Since we experience weather, not climate, images have been used to regist...
Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer
Accumulation figures prominently in the environmental concerns of the twenty-first century. Greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. Toxins accu...
Stephanie LeMenager
A firestorm is a fire whose intensity is so great that it creates and sustains its own weather. Its own wind system, to be more precise. The Horse Riv...
Robin Kelsey
In his 2015 article, “Against the Anthropocene: A Neo-Materialist Perspective,” historian Tim LeCain argues that the term Anthropocene succumbs, h...
Emily Apter
The mine, as we know, is a time-honored figure for modes of knowledge acquisition, resonating in cliché expressions like “digging for information,...
Orit Halpern
From the tailings of large open pit mines and omnipresent data centers to the over-concentration of capital in the hands of the few, we appear to be i...
With the rise of Trumpism, the US finds itself in nothing less than a state of emergency. We face a conflictual and volatile regime of post-liberal pl...
All the architecture that we know of is architecture of the Holocene. Architecture has had to deal with a lot of unpredictable factors, but the climat...
The Anthropocene renders visible new architectures of time and matter, both sedimenting existing genealogies of global-world-space and radically reorg...
Nick Axel, Daniel A. Barber, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Anton Vidokle
Accumulation is a new project by Daniel A. Barber and e-flux Architecture, featuring contributions by Emily Apter, T.J. Demos, Robin Kelsey, Orit Halp...
Category
Capitalism
Subject
Extractivism, Anthropocene, Climate change, Accidents & Disasters

Accumulation is a project by e-flux Architecture and Daniel A. Barber produced in cooperation with the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University, the Speculative Life Lab at the Milieux Institute, Concordia University Montréal, the Princeton School of Architecture, and the PhD Program in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.

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