Horizons, Dimensions and Atmospheres
Throughout history, the night has been a threshold: a horizon where new possibilities emerge, where sensory and affective intensities amplify, and where urban and social forms acquire different shapes. In contemporary contexts, these horizons multiply, they stretch across cities illuminated by cultural events, across informal and precarious territories, across digital and planetary infrastructures, and across communities negotiating visibility, safety, and belonging.
To study the night today is to explore how dimensions of space, time, mobility, and inequality shift after dark. Night-time economies intersect with tourism; dark-sky movements intersect with biodiversity protection; nightlife intersects with governance; nocturnal labour intersects with global rhythms of production and care. These multilayered dimensions reveal the complexity of the night as an object of inquiry and as a lived, contested, and negotiated space.
At the same time, the atmospheres of the night—its lights, sounds, temperatures, densities, flows, and affects—shape how urban environments are sensed and inhabited. Atmospheric conditions produce attachments and aversions; they generate feelings of wonder, safety, discomfort, or belonging; and they influence how people move, gather, celebrate, resist, or work. Artistic interventions, design practices, and technological infrastructures play a key role in producing and modulating these atmospheres.
ICNS.LX7 invites contributions that investigate these horizons, dimensions, and atmospheres of the night; that interrogate how nocturnal futures are imagined and built; and that expand the conceptual, methodological, and practical possibilities of Night Studies.
Speaker 2026
Scientific Committee ’26
Soundtrack’26
About ICNS.LX 7
The International Conference on Night Studies is an international platform dedicated to advancing frontier research, artistic practice, and professional knowledge related to the global urban night.
ICNS fosters dialogue between academia, civic actors, artists, activists, and policy-makers, strengthening international cooperation and expanding Night Studies as a field of inquiry.
ICNS.LX7 was held fully online from 7–9 October 2026.
Organised by the International Night Studies Network (INSN) and LXNIGHTS Research Group, with institutional support from collaborating universities and research centres.
