Night Visions: Light Pollution, Nocturnality, and the Contemporary Politics of Illumination 

Contemporary environmentalism entails a suspicion of the values and symbolic systems of the enlightenment, within which the figure of light remains deeply entangled. Recent years have seen a new valuation of “darkness” emerging as an environmental ideal across different artistic, philosophical and ecological contexts. Timothy Morton calls for a “dark ecology”; the 2020 Transdisciplinary Imaging Conference called for responses to the notion to a “Dark Eden”; Jonathan Crary draws attention to the hyper-illumination of a 24/7 world and the resultant “ends of sleep”; and the global “Dark Sky Movement” seeks to protect sanctuaries of darkness from the encroaching threat of light pollution. Like the concept of “wilderness”, the quality of “darkness” in many ways serves as a container into which frustrations with contemporary life are poured. “Darkness” comes to stand in for an attractive set of qualities that are seen as being eroded by screen ubiquity and the spread of neoliberal capitalist relations; including rest, nature, interiority, and a “healthier” relationship to time. But to what extent does this valuation of darkness simply reinforce the light/dark dialectic at the root of enlightenment thought?

Drawing on diverse examples from environmental policy and discourse, popular culture, moving image culture and consumer technology, this thesis seeks to interrogate the contemporary politics of illumination by examining how the symbolic lives of light and dark are entangled with the socio- technical systems used to mediate these qualities. Bridging the issue of both environmental “light pollution” and other questions about the contemporary role of light (including screen exposure, surveillance and spectacle), it unpacks the attributes that are automatically ascribed to dark space by virtue of its relationship to light, and tries to disentangle from this what might be useful about using darkened space and its attendant figures to think through questions about the relationship between ecological and human systems. It pays close attention to the role that technologies play in mediating both actual and conceptual landscapes of illumination. In doing so, it investigates how the boundary between the “natural” and “artificial” is constructed when it comes to questions of light, darkness and our relationship to them.

Central to my research is the question of how the light/dark dialectic is bound up with anxieties about visions, in both sense of the word – the way we see the world around us, and the way we imagine futures for it. Ultimately, by working through the ways in which illumination and darkness are defined in opposition and in relation to each other in contemporary life, I seek to uncover what might be called an “aesthetics of nocturnality” – a mode of philosophic and artistic enquiry that foregrounds partial, uncertain and situated understandings of the world. Drawing on experiments with DIY night vision technologies, I think about how the challenge of “seeing in the dark” opens up attunements to more-than-human subjectivities, and disrupts the emphasis on clarity of vision that persists as a relic of Enlightenment thought.