Outsourced War

Since 2014 I’ve been looking at what contracting data can tell us about military operations. My first piece of work on this was a report commissioned by the Remote Control Project, a proof-of-concept example of data-mining about the activities of the US Special Operations Command. It led to a more ambitious series of investigations with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, culminating in the revelation of a $500 million propaganda project in Iraq run by a British PR agency.

My further exploration of this theme, entitled War Taxonomy: An Encyclopaedia of Conditions for Lethal Force, was presented at The Glass Room, London in 2017.

This led to a second collaboration with artist Edmund Clark and designer Ben Weaver, entitled Cosmopolemos, to be published by Loose Joints in 2026. I’ll add info on associated exhibitions and events over the second half of the year.

With the publication of Cosmopolemos imminent, I’ve decided to post the original essay which, almost a decade ago, planted the seed for it. So if you want to read about military contracting data, Borges’s library, the Westinghouse time capsule, Diderot and D'Alembert’s dwarfs and giants and an austere airstrip in Djibouti, look no further.