Eco-Aesthetic Opacity and the Moving Image

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Roberdeau, Wood. 2019. 'Eco-Aesthetic Opacity and the Moving Image'. In: Darkness 2019: Island Dynamics Conference. Longyearbyen, Svalbard and Jan Mayen 13 - 17 January 2019. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

Recently, artists and theorists have argued a necessary unknowability towards objects and encounters to promote environmental receptivity. For Levi Bryant, these dark spaces connote a ‘black’ or ‘existential’ ecology, ‘insofar as it presents an image of the universe that is indifferent to our existence…[one that] is intended to spur us into action.’ Pure divisions between humans and the Umwelt can be productively disturbed, and Timothy Morton’s thought is also committed to opacity or dark wildernesses, particularly at the level of ‘ecognosis’ or our adjustment towards feasible engagements with ‘weird’ attunements. The human drive to illuminate or to know is rightly confounded by the elusiveness, affectivity and differentiation of perception. Such ‘darkness’ succeeds at problematizing for the twenty-first century what Heidegger distinguished between ‘earth’ and ‘world’, raising questions of dwelling and totality. This paper addresses these intriguing concepts for an opaque eco-aesthetics through Scott Barley’s remarkable film Sleep Has Her House (2017).

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Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)