Brian Larkin (Columbia University, New York/ Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin):
The Political Aesthetic of Light

I examine the operations of light as a medium. Starting from the aesthetic, sensorial experience of inhabiting light I trace back the broader political economy that gives rise to the how and why light as a medium exists as it does. Drawing on histories of empire, anti-colonial nationalism, extractivist economies, I argue that the experience of inhabiting light and darkness is a marked aesthetic and sensorial experience metareflexively standing for and against an entire extractivist economy.

Lecture as part of the research colloquium at the Chair for “Media and Knowledge” and the Center for Advanced Studies “Applied Humanities: Genealogy and Politics,” HU Berlin.

No registration required.