Public lecture: Seán Cubitt – Ecocritique and the Night Sky

Perhaps the oldest and most fundamental act of looking, star-gazing still has much to teach about ecologies of the senses. Once the meeting place of humans, gods and ancestors, over history the night sky became a constellation of objects for religious, and scientific instruction and eventually for profit. Initially overcome by awe, astrological lore and astronomical sciences committed to the split between objects and subjects in an attempt to control the enormity of the night. Ecocritique starts with negations: of presence, being, humanity, truth and virtue; but only in order to imagine healing the rifts between humans, technologies and ecologies. The enchantment of the Milky Way persists despite the engines of rationalism and the satellite industry. Ecocritique seeks out failures to control the night and how people, nature and machines experience it in pursuit of new ways of considering, imagining and making the cosmos.