Clark & Black build an oblique encyclopaedia of American military power, marshalling public defence data and the Pentagon's own photography into an object whose scale mirrors the very system it scrutinises. Cosmopolemos , from the Greek for order and for war, refers to the ordered universe of war itself. 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. America spends as much on defence each year as the next nine countries combined, some 40 per cent of the world's total military budget, concentrated inside a system that isn't secret so much as simply too vast, too dispersed, to ever really be grasped. Clark & Black's answer to that illegibility is, quite literally, to read it, as a site of critical inquiry, of speaking truth to power. A modern iteration of the encyclopaedia, Clark & Black's dive into the black box predicates itself on its own unknowability, emphasised by photographic illustrations that reappropriate imagery, both connected and disparate, absurd and clear-eyed, gathered directly from the Department of Defense's own image library.