Rethinking Darkness

Nick Dunn is Professor of Urban Design and Executive Director of Imagination, the design research lab at Lancaster University, UK. He is senior fellow at the Institute for Social Futures. Nick has authored numerous books, journal articles and reports on cities, futures and darkness.Tim Edensor is Professor of Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Tourists at the Taj (1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002), Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017), and Stone: Stories of Urban Materiality (2020).

• Introduction Venturing into the Dark: Gloomy Multiplicities Part 1: Histories of The Dark 1. Affordances of the Night: Work After Dark in the Ancient World 2. Shakespeare’s Darkness: A Stage and State of Mind 3. In the Night Garden: Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London 1800-1859 4. A Short History of Artificial Darkness and Race Part 2: Cultural Practices in the Dark 5. Purda: The Curtain of Darkness 6. Inuit’s Perception of Darkness: A Singular Feature 7. Darkness in Videogame Landscapes: Corporeal and Representational Entanglements 8. Dancing in The Darkness To The Darkness Part 3: Sensing Darkness 9. Creatures of The Night: Bodies, Rhythms And Aurora Borealis 10. Contact Zones: The Galloway Forest Dark Sky Park as Creative Milieu 11. How Does the Dark Sound? 12. Ghosts and Empties Part 4: Designing with Darkness 13. Going Dark: The Theatrical Legacy of Battersea Art Centre’s Playing In The Dark Season 14. On Darkness, Duration and Possibility 15. Darkness as Canvas 16. Designing with Light and Darkness Afterword Revisiting the Dark: Diverse Encounters and Experiences