”Darkness Matters” by Costanza Julia Bani
Darkness Matters is a transdisciplinary collaborative artistic research project in the field of speculative and generative documentary. It will be a 25-minute-long time and place travel exploring the future of light and sound pollution.
The aim is to co-create immersive 360 degrees audio-visuals, possibly in 3D, addressing these urgent but underrepresented environmental crises. Specifically we want to represent the (eco)-systems fireflies and stars and the way they fill the nocturnal vault. The result will be exhibited in a full dome environment but is adaptable to other formats and exposition spaces. The meditative experience offered will ideally incite (young) audiences to pro-actively reconsider their relationship to darkness and consequently to light and acoustic pollution.
With Darkness Matters the interest is both in best practices in digital storytelling and in investigating if machines can offer truthful representations and therefore be more reliable than humans. We want to test technology’s role in shaping the future of creative expression, expanding documentary narratives.
As project leader and creative producer, I want to work in equal co-authorship with invited artists and scientists, and in cooperation with technology and nature itself; the purpose is to be able to project possible evolutions of the landscapes we want to portray in a more-than-true setting, using exhibition places that can guarantee an auditory-sensory involvement of the viewer and listener.
Darkness Matters tries to redefine documentary’s gesture and identity beyond indexicality, rooting it in today’s techno-cultures and its relation to the concept of “documenting” the/a truth. Specifically concerning ecological issues.
Aim and research questions
Our aim is to place artistic research in a context of relevant topics that are a direct consequence of our current lifestyle. How can Art become part of a transformation? What approaches can create experiences that initiate engagement? Darkness Matters wants to establish synergies between art, science and technology to preserve the past, record the present and ideally capture the future.
Research implementation and anticipated impact
The research will be carried out through workshops among the interested disciplines. By 2028 Darkness Matters will be presented on the Research Catalogue, in a final symposium at interested venues, like Tekniska Museet, other Wisdomes and full dome venues in other countries. Through a collaboration with Vetenskapens Hus and AiRstructures we plan to disseminate the research to the surrounding society presenting the research outcome in their inflatable domes.
Collaboration
NATIONAL COLLABORATIONS
Erik Gandini, and creative technologist Valentin Malmgren at SKH;
Roberto Bresin, Director of NAVET, KTH’s transdisciplinary research hub , which exemplifies contamination in practice (KTH – Royal Institute of Technology - Division Of Media Technology And Interaction Design); Read more here: NAVET
Oliver Akermo, Director of Photography, specialized in immersive storytelling
Professor Dan E. Nilsson, Lund’s Faculty of Biology, exploring tech-art in evolutionary biology.
Read more here: Lund’s Faculty of Biology
Alberto Dominguez Vicent and Abinaya Priya VenkataramKarolinska Institutet’s Ophthalmology Department: The Division of Eye and Vision, Dept of Physiological Optics (process of seeing, optics of the eye, physiological and psychological process of seeing, structure of the eye and visual system).
Read more here: KI, The Division of Eye and Vision
Tekniska Museet / Wisdome – will offer an arena for the implementation as well as the Wisdome in Malmö (TBC);
Vetenskapens Hus / – will offer their portable dome to bring Darkness Matters to schools or show it to classes coming to them;
Jonas Johansson – applying AI as an adjuvant for artistic practice, who is actively initiating the Dome Dreaming festival in Sweden.
INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATIONS
Irene Borgna, Anthropologist / light pollution expert, author of Cieli Neri, my first collaborators on this project
Read more here
Daniel Hanley, biologist and developer of the novel camera system to record animal vision, George Mason University, USA
Professor Kevin Gaston, The Environment and Sustainability Institute (ESI) University of Exeter, biodiversity and conservation studies
Read more here
Fabio Falchi, Physicist, author of the World Atlas of Light Pollution, Astronomers (IDA, International Dark Skies Association)
Roberto Morbidelli, astrophysics at INAF (Italy)
Ruskin Hartley, CEO Dark Sky International (USA)
Federico Pellegrino, CEO Sideralis Aps (Italy)
SISME, a company offering, producing and distributing high tech audio-visual solutions;
UK based creative technologists Brendan Dawes together with UK based Hardware developers Teenage Engineering and software developers at Anamorph, a generative media studio and software company exploring the future of cinema, whose mission is to open up new creative possibilities for filmmakers and provide one-of-a-kind viewing experiences for audiences. (TBC)
Alex D’Emilia DOP specialized in mountain shootings
Nicola Gualandris and Naomi Galbiati, sound artists and designers, field recordings (Italy)
Schedule
The artistic research project will end with an output we aim to release – depending on financing and funding availability between summer 2026 and 2028.
