Cosmopolemos, from the Greek for order and for war, refers to the ordered universe of war itself. Across seven years of forensic collaboration, artist Edmund Clark and investigative reporter Crofton Black have scoured publicly available archives to build an index of American military spending from the $6.5 trillion in contracts issued by the U.S. Department of Defense between the attacks of September 2001 and the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan two decades later. Cosmopolemos scans across over 43 million recorded transactions that contain, in detail both granular and mighty, everything a superpower might conceivably need to wage war and sustain itself while doing so, with oil reserves and nuclear weapons sitting inside the same ledger as cookies and cleaning contracts.
Images of "Cosmopolemos" by Loose Joints. Images courtesy of Edmund Clark and Crofton Black.