ICNS.LX & INSN – Media and Night

Visualities of the Night: Representation and image-making in audio-visual media

CHAIRED BY

Eleonora Diamanti ⚑ Italy – John Cabot University, Department of Communications
Will Straw ⚑ Canada – McGill University, Art History and Communication Studies

DESCRIPTION

Night has posed both a challenge to visual media and offered itself as an experimental field for the emergence of aesthetic principles and visual technologies. The challenge which comes with the lack of daylight has generated strategies for coping with darkness, such as those used in the film industry to create night-time settings during the day, with filters and lighting (the so-called nuit américaine). As a field of experimentation, the night has stimulated the emergence of technological apparatuses that “look” into the night. Recent visual technologies, from infrared cameras to thermal imaging, have been developed with the goal of conquering darkness through an intruding gaze, establishing documentary night filming techniques. The night has also generated a variety of aesthetic devices for the representation of nocturnal life in audiovisual media, from figures such as night wanderers and guardians, through ways of exploring night-time worlds, such as the single-night narrative, in which stories unfold over a single night. This panel explores the image-making techniques and aesthetic principles we might find in visual representations of the night across various audio-visual media.