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Paper short abstract

The relativity and materiality of darkness opens thinking around sensation as a distributed form of atmospheric attunement. Drawing on papermaking and bioplastic techniques, and ethnographic attention to sense-making around darkness, the paper attends, in particular, to molecular scales.

Paper long abstract

In the Permian Basin, darkness emerges as a matter of care in a regime of 27/7 LED-lit oil and gas operations, as atmospheric qualities become subject to interpretations of toxicity and encroachment. Initiatives to designate the area as an International Dark Sky Zone include measuring darkness, hosting star parties, and workshops to demonstrate ‘good’ lighting techniques, change city ordinances, and educate about circadian rhythms. Yet, the relativity and materiality of darkness opens thinking around sensation as an unstable and distributed form of atmospheric attunement.

With ethnographic attention to modes of sense-making around light pollution, ham radio, star parties, darkness measurement, ghost lights, fireflies, the clouds of Venus, and UFOs, I argue that darkness creates ‘textures’ of knowing among tendencies of abstraction. Tracing, in particular, chemosynthetic microbes as they ‘drift’ through darkness ‘quietly metabolizing the sky,’ (Wilkins, nd) I focus 'para-matters' at molecular scales, where bacteria that do not need light point to both the origins and definitions of life and their potential to repair or aid in processes of decarbonization or methane removal. Attending to the ‘soft’ matter of darkness (Smalbegovic 2021), questions emerge around chemical and molecular affects, as well as how they come to matter as toxins, political points, scientific evidence or not at all.

Drawing on papermaking and bioplastic techniques as methods for thinking with deformations of the sensible, atmospheric milieus, and material substrates, the paper unfolds within a sequence of blurry images of extraterrestrial clouds and ignus fautus as a speculative poetics.