This event addresses a fundamental problem for contemporary theory: How can we think the darkness?

On one side of this darkness is a regression and slippage back to gothic-romanticism, a state of mind, and thinking that FWJ Schelling alluded to when he said:

“History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute”.

On the other side, is the scientific-realist perception of and about the darkness, as it overwhelms us, and encourages immersion in absolute [nothingness-strangeness-the alien]: i.e. it performs as the nature of the universe.

We begin from a consolidated position of darkness: <<No hope, no future, no humanity, no way out, no limitations to thinking the darkness …>>

From this start-point spring 3 perspectives:

Dark Anthropocene = geology folding back into a singularity 

Afropessimism = contemporary methodology for destroying the world 

Non-standard animism = a politics of indivisible extra-terran non/humanity 

The three perspectives are material experiments in working with and in the darkness. The stakes of these experiments are multiple — they constitute finding something when one is blind. The risks are high, the rewards potentially immense. This is not theory by any other name than an encounter on a dark horizon...

David R. Cole is Professor of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University, whose research interests span a number of sub-disciplines in the geosciences and chemistry. He is Director of the OSU Subsurface Energy Materials Characterization and Analysis Laboratory (SEMCAL), Chair of the Deep Energy Community of the Sloan Foundation funded Deep Carbon Observatory, and a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America.

Andrew Culp is an intermedia scholar and current Visiting Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication at the University of Texas, Dallas. His most recent book is Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Bogna M. Konior is a scholar, curator, performer, and poet. She is Director of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, Asia and a founding member of New Materialism Society, Hong Kong.

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