jessie beier

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) offers a host of situated activities and speculative probes designed to respond to today and tomorrow’s energy emergencies. Intermingling diagrammatic designs with instructional convolutions and perplexing protocols, the kit provides a non-programmatic yet highly pragmatic collocation of materials for navigating, communicating, operating, and un-doing the investments that have come to overdetermine energetic relations in the past, present, and future.

Triggered most immediately by the pandemic moment circa 2020, with its strangely intermittent and inscrutable convolutions of petrocultural business-as-usual, this kit reflects and reckons the long-roiling and fully chronic energy emergency orchestrated over several centuries by racial-fossil capitalism’s mass production of injustices. Situated within today’s petro-cultural ubiquity, but also highly skeptical of the facticity of such claims, this repair kit positions energy as more than just a resource to be exploited and managed, more than an infrastructural obstacle to overcome, more than fuel for the nightmares that lie ahead (or that are, in too many cases, already here). Energy is life. Energy is death. Energy involves investments and divestments -- of desire; of affective connection; of interspecies interdependence; of care and repair. 

The thinkers and makers in Team E.E.R.K. conspired with multitudinous experts, from mycelial decomposers and speculative designers to ferromagnetic attractors and recording engineers, to create a provocatively user-friendly guide to various modes and methods for grappling with the pressing energy scenarios that burn today and may flare tomorrow. While our mycelial comrades have influenced our understanding of structure, reciprocity, and decay, our sonic agents, at least when we can hear them, have helped us to develop approaches to mediation and listening in these noisy times. In behind such collaborative collegial effort lurks an agglomeration of fibre-optic cables, server farms, and online platforms vital to the development of this repair kit and to the relations enabling its manufacture. And remember that at every point the kit will concentrate low alongside high levels of energy spent on and vital to its creation: the bonds of endeavour; the glow of affection; the pulse of attunement; the drive of subtraction; the charge of uncertainty; the resilience of exhaustion; the obstinacy of making do; the shadow of fossils; the pull of futurity; the zeroes and ones; the force of an otherwise.