Darkness as material - PhD project - 2023
(2023)
author(s): Mia Engberg
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
The doctoral project Darkness as Material, examines darkness as material and its relationship to cinematic storytelling. The study addresses different kinds of darkness: darkness in the image, darkness in the cinema theatre, darkness in the spectator where films are received and the darkness in the filmmaker, where the world is reflected and ideas are born. The project is inspired by Marguerite Duras' idea to kill cinema, and it explores film's potential to approach the place she described as 'the dark room, where we are deaf and blind and passion is possible'.
Corona Influentia och den mörkare materian
(2021)
author(s): Timo Menke
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
In my practice as an artist, I constantly return to the dark agency of cosmic and (micro)biological matter. I explore how it may transform, “infect” or enter into symbiotic relationships, that are linguistic, visual, and trans-material in the spirit of Karen Barad. The aim of my work is to offer an outline of what I refer to as a dark enlightenment, by using the ontological and epistemological discourses that humans are entangled in. This text is a manuscript for a performance lecture about bats, viruses, and dark matter, illuminated by a Corona inside Plato’s cave. Similar to and in contrast with the microscopic size of the virus, the pandemic is not here understood as the ultimate disaster, but rather as a footnote in a much vaster narrative that involves a manifold of associated phenomena, related to Timothy Morton’s hyperobject. From the view point of speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and hauntology, the virus may be capable of hiding future consequences that dwell in our darkened contemporary world. In short, the manuscript may be understood as a contribution to the dark microhistory of an infection. The current version of my work was adapted for online publication, with visual elements of composition.
Black Lungs
(2019)
author(s): Sepideh Karami
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The ultimate act of taking risk in life lays in the proximity to death. When a risk being taken is prone to fail, failure can potentially become the failure to live. These risky moments involve decisions, dreams, imaginings that motivate one to take action. The motivation is strong enough to push one to a fragile border between death and life.
In this exposition, I situate the discussion of risk in coal mines, investigating the work of coal miners as a craft through which they develop subversive modes of labour. The story in this exposition starts millions of years ago and gives a fictional geological history of Earth, where the formation of coal plays an important role in the planet’s evolution; coal becomes the political summary of Earth, where various moments of risk lead us down into a coal mine. Through a vertical structure poised on the edge of death and life, and by means of writing and drawing, risk is experimented with using concepts such as imprecision, the materiality of darkness, and the fragility of working with such materiality.
