About this Event
“This study exposes the connections between seemingly ordinary patterns of contemporary life and the global systems to which they are connected. Tracking the lifecycle of familiar objects creates a vivid, dramatic narrative–with shocking implications for understanding every aspect of our (generally unexamined) daily routines.” —Johanna Drucker
Affluvia is a neologism for the “toxic off-gassing of affluent culture.” Approximately 60,000 words, the text is focused entirely on tracking the ecological costs of the author making coffee and feeding her cats every morning. The actions take less than ten minutes, but they 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. The illustrated study breaks the coffee making and pet feeding into component parts—the lifecycle of the beans, coffee grinder, coffee maker, pet food, aluminum can, label, bowls and spoon—and profiles each in turn.
Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. She has held faculty positions at Columbia University, Yale University, the University of Virginia and been the recipient of fellowships from Harvard, the Beinecke Library, the Getty, and Fulbright.
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).
Drucker’s artist’s books are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a traveling 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).
In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2021 was the recipient of the AIGA’s Steven Heller Award for Cultural Criticism. She is currently working on ChronoVis, a platform for humanistic time modeling, as well as various other projects.
Her most recent publication, Inventing the Alphabet, was and .
Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist working as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he serves as faculty for the Digital Humanities, the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies, and the UCLA Game Lab.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
ARTBOOK @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 917 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, United States
USD 0.00
