Inquiry

Who does and doesn’t get counted? What is value? Who is doing the valuing? How do we detect the scales and metrics that organize our lives? We ask these questions not only to study the systems and structures (financial, legal, algorithmic, or administrative) that govern lives and livelihoods, but also to experiment with how they might be visualized, understood, and embodied outside of their conventional languages. How can artists game the assumptions embedded in systems of accumulation and governance to redistribute power or expose faults? What knowledges do disembodied metrics fail to convey? Across engagements with chemical contamination, disaster and its management, economic theory, impacts of financial crashes, crypto-currency mining, justice for migrant workers, government investment programs, alternative economies, global commodity chains, and surveillance-based metrics, we continue to probe what it means to measure and count.