Energy Emergency Repair Kit - by The E E R K Collective (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A fictional manual to help disrupt today's all-too-real energy and climate emergencies

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation inter-vention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy, emergency, and repair. The E.E.R.K combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual--that staple genre of self-help and self-making--while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers.

Created collectively by artists, designers, and scholars working and living at various places on Turtle Island, the E.E.R.K. offers a host of situated activities and speculative probes designed to respond to today and tomorrow's energy emergencies. The kit intermingles diagrammatic designs with instructional convolutions and perplexing protocols that supply non-programmatic yet highly pragmatic means for navigating, communicating, operating, and undoing 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 fossil-fueled business-as-usual, the E.E.R.K. reflects and reckons the long-roiling and fully chronic energy emergency orchestrated over several centuries by racial-fossil capitalism's mass production of injustices.

The E.E.R.K. 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). As a generative, multitudinous fabulation, the E.E.R.K. probes energetic networks--the bonds of endeavor; 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 other-wise--that, together, seem to compose the circuits of energy emergency now.

Review Quotes

Pulling the reader into the warp and weft of petro-capitalist eco-devastation, the Energy Emergency Repair Kit offers prompts for attention, reflection, and action in a world where security is impossible, hope is dubious, and new forms of speculation are necessary. A tour-de-force of SF worlding, E.E.R.K. calls for non-innocent modes of reparative care. And it does it all with a wink and a smile.---Natalie Loveless, author of How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit echoes and expands the history of manifestos in calling for radical social change, diagramming potential routes beyond petro-futures by transfiguring the protocols of repair systems into dancing mycelial rituals of care. Poetic in form and content, it calls us to co-create new roots and counter-shoots of compassionate actions for our more-than-human communities of emergence between emergencies.---Ricardo Dominguez, Electronic Disturbance Theater

About the Author

The E.E.R.K. Collective is a group of artists, designers, and scholars from across Turtle Island. The Collective engages in "decomp poesis," a creative practice focused on exploring speculative encounters to promote care and repair. By collaborating with a wide array of experts, the Collec-tive embodies a commitment to deviating designs and fostering innovative approaches to energy and environmental challenges.