June 2018
Eds. D.T. Cochrane, Alison Cooley, Fraser McCallum, Christine Shaw
and Joy Xiang
Published by Blackwood Gallery
A serial broadsheet publication featuring commissioned essays, artists' projects, and interviews.
Issue 01: GRAFTING is now available in print and online.
The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) is a serial broadsheet publication produced by the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga, as part of The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea, a site-specific exhibition, public program, and publication series designed to expand perspectives on climate change through artistic practices, cultural inquiry, and political mobilization.
In order to productively collide with the present crisis, we recognize that ideas cannot be constrained by disciplines. SDUK composes and circulates an ecology of knowledge based on the relationship and antagonism of “useful” ideas. The name of this innovative platform is borrowed from a non-profit society founded in London in 1826, focused on publishing inexpensive texts such as the widely read Penny Magazine and The Library of Useful Knowledge, and aimed at spreading important world knowledge to anyone seeking to self-educate. Both continuing and troubling the origins of the society, the Blackwood Gallery’s SDUK platform brings artists, scientists, activists, and publics into an interdisciplinary, intercultural, intergenerational reassessment of the history of capitalism and colonialism and their environmental legacies in the present.
The SDUK broadsheet series brings together contributors from diverse fields in the sciences and humanities, students and faculty from across the University of Toronto Mississauga, community organizations and activists, policy makers and policy agitators, artist researchers and speculative thinkers, all to advance new forms of literacy around climate change discourse.
The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge broadsheet series takes aim at a broad range of concerns—and this issue, GRAFTING, explores how we come to know, define, and interact with nature, where we see its boundaries and identify its needs, and how we understand its entanglement with culture.
Drawing attention to the relative scales of geologic and human time, the Geologic Time Spiral is an apt starting place for an inquiry into the Anthropocene. Earth’s origin and early life are obscure, receding into a distant past some 4.5 billion years ago—but as time and the spiral unfold, more details emerge. Depicted is the story of a changing planet and evolving life, a story recovered from the rocks that form the planet’s crust. Human-time barely registers, yet our traces may define the next chapter.
- Excerpted from “On The Geologic Time Spiral” by Lisa Hall in Issue 01: GRAFTING (p. 3)
Amanda Boetzkes
Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research
The Climate Change Project, City of Mississauga
Heather Davis
Endocrine Disruptors Action Group
Lisa Hall
Julie Joosten
Elizabeth LaPensée
The LEAP
Yihan Li
Morris Lum
Shannon Mattern
Andrea Olive
Kika Thorne
Zoe Todd
Kyle Powys Whyte
Tania Willard
Publisher: Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga
Editors: D.T. Cochrane, Alison Cooley, Fraser McCallum, Christine Shaw & Joy Xiang
Designer: Matthew Hoffman
Copy Editor: Jeffrey Malecki
Printer: Thistle Printing
The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge is developed in collaboration with The Climate Change Project (City of Mississauga, Environment Division).
The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the operating support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded in part
through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment,
the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.
The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the additional support of the Jackman
Humanities Institute and the University of Toronto Affinity Partner, TD Insurance.
