Johanna Drucker

Broschiertes Buch

Affluvia

The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture

Beschreibung

What are the ecological costs of innocuous-seeming daily routines? This book addresses that question by exploring the (usually) unexamined aspects of the ten minutes in which I make coffee and feed my cats every morning. Everything involved is quite mundane-coffee beans and a grinder, cat food from cans put into glass bowls, water to rinse the serving spoon. The activity is not particularly extravagant, but is simply an ordinary part of contemporary lifestyle in first world culture. And then-I expose what underpins this everyday life. The examination of the lifecycle of production and consumption reveals the ways these familiar objects are connected to complex networks of industrial production, extraction industries, human rights and labor issues, pollution of air and water, and destruction of human and animal habitat. Each chapter focuses on one part of that routine, exploding the apparently simple activity into component parts. "Making Coffee" describes the lifecycle of beans from planting to roasting, the production of the coffee bag in which the beans are packaged and sold, the manufacture of the coffee grinder and coffee maker, the filter, half and half, and even the coffee cup. "Feeding the Cats" traces the cat food, the can and label, spoon, and bowls. Even the water, electricity, and waste products come under examination. The book is a vivid, dramatic, account of the environmental and social impact of ordinary everyday activities and is aimed at a broad general readership.

Autor

Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita in Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in visual epistemology, history of graphic design, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Recent work includes Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Visualization and Interpretation (MIT Press, 2020), and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press 2020), Digital Humanities 101: An introduction to Digital Methods (Routledge, 2021). Her 1995 The Century of Artists' Books remains a crucial reference text for the field. Drucker's artist's books are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a travelling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, in 2012-2014. Other recent work includes Diagrammatic Writing (Onomatopée, 2014), The General Theory of Social Relativity, (The Elephants, 2018), and Downdrift: An Eco-fiction (Three Rooms Press, 2018). Her well-known titles include The Word Made Flesh (1989) and The History of the/my Wor(l)d (1990), both from Druckwork. With artist Susan Bee she created A Girl's Life (2002), Fabulas Feminae (2015), and Off-World Fairy Tales (2020); with Brad Freeman, The Fall (2018). In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 2021 was the recipient of the AIGA's Steven Heller Award for Cultural Criticism, and in 2024 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. One recent publication, Inventing the Alphabet, was reviewed in The New York Review of Books https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/01/19/alphabet-politics-the-greatest-invention-silvia-ferrara/ and The London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n04/gill-partington/in-the-mad-laboratory

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bridge Art, NFP
• Seitenzahl: 334
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. Mai 2025
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 203mm x 127mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 532g
• ISBN-13: 9798987933084
• Artikelnr.: 73940336