COSMOPOLEMOS: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of the United States Department of Defense Contract Spending from 2001/9/11 to 2021/8/30

Presentation of new research to be published later this year:

COSMOPOLEMOS: An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of the United States Department of Defense Contract Spending from 2001/9/11 to 2021/8/30

By Edmund Clark & Crofton Black

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Cosmopolemos /koz-mə-pol'e-mos/ noun
The ordered universe of war.
From Greek: kósmos order, universe; pólemos war, the personification of war
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Cosmopolemos is an exploration of knowledge and meaning in relation to an overwhelming edifice of power. America spends as much on its defence as the next
nine countries put together each year, accounting for 40% of military spending worldwide. $6.5 trillion worth of contracts were issued by the U.S. Department of
Defense between the attacks of 9/11 and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. The items accounted for between these two iconic events encompass
every aspect of life and death - from oil reserves and nuclear weapons to cookies and cleaning services: over 43 million recorded transactions, with contractors large
and small. These corporate relationships underpin the military hegemony of the world’s foremost superpower. They aren’t secret. But their scale and complexity
challenges understanding. We decided to interrogate this complexity using a traditional, now redundant form: the printed Encyclopaedia. For centuries humans
have grappled with their imperfect knowledge of the universe using this form to portray inconceivable complexity between two covers. Photographic illustration is
provided by the DoD’s photo gallery - the images it chooses to represent itself. We provide these images in two contexts, a Gazetteer focussing on countries where
activities take place, and a Glossary of words found in both the descriptive field of a transaction and the caption field of an image file. In combining the Department of Defense
transaction data with its soft-focus photography of American military power, this Encyclopaedia offers a representation of everything the US military paid for everywhere.

How can we comprehend the meaning and scale of such power and our significance before it?

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Power and Secrecy: A Research and Representation Lab

This is a one-day symposium, co-hosted with SPIN (Secrecy, Power, and Ignorance research Network), drawing together visual artist, academics and practitioners to explore and discuss the latest research and practices of visualising secrecy and power. The day will involve an interplay of academic research and art practice, raising questions of how different disciplinary approaches and methods transverse, intersect and extend our capacity to create, represent, imagine and share unique insights into systems of power and resistance, especially in connection with covering, containing, obscuring, evading and other visual ways that secrecy is made and contested.

And the questions or prompts that we have asked you to respond to - and to bear in mind for questions and discussions:
- How is secrecy (whether 'narrower' state secrecy, everyday secrecy, or 'broader' structural secrecy) present in your work?
- How are hidden structures of power visualised?
- How are the visualities of secrecy powerful?
- What are the aesthetics of secrecy and how is this related to power?
- What is the relationship between creativity, visuality, unknowing, secrecy and power?

The event is intended to be a meeting place for an interdisciplinary conversation about the themes of secrecy and power, and an opportunity for visual art practitioners and academics to compare and develop work and ideas. There is obviously overlap between these disciplines and the participants, but the distinction is a way to start a conversation, indeed, perhaps the value of the distinction may be part of the conversation.

The outcomes are open-ended. It will, hopefully, be stimulating day for all concerned that leads to shared insights into two important aspects of contemporary
existence. It may provide some of us with ideas for new work or research, or how to progress the projects shared on the day, or the opportunity for inter-disciplinary collaboration.It may see the germination of a further public event, or a group exhibition idea. Who knows?