We are a small group of individuals who came together to expand the horizon of artistic and scientific debates around quantification and accountability in society. Through this project  we aim to engage artists and academics in an exchange and co-creation around numbers. The project involves a photography prize which aims to guide the lens of photographs around the world towards quantification, its aesthetics, and its effects/affects on humans, their bodies, their relations/lives, but also nature and human's relations to it. The submissions would then be used as the basis for academic reflections/developments. Following two academic workshops involving a selected group of scholars working at the crossroads of art and accounting/quantification we aim to publish an edited volume which would include prints of selected photographic submissions and academic contributions/reflections.

 

This is an invitation to think about how our lives are changing due to the rising capacity and urge to quantify. Below are some of the questions for which we search “fresh” answers. What accounts do we create (or forget to create) as we quantify? What practices have emerged or vanished as a result of quantification? What intended and not intended consequences it brings about? What controversies and difficulties lie under the apparent rationality of this process?