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Dark Futures: When the Lights Go Down

By Nick Dunn

Following on from his previous bestselling book, Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City (Zero, 2016), Nick Dunn has written a sequel that expands its scope to encourage us to reimagine and reconfigure our relationship with darkness for the benefit of people, place, and planet.

Dark Futures provides a new way of thinking about the world. Light is everywhere, often uninvited as a by-product of our contemporary lives. Darkness meanwhile appears unwanted, yet is essential to our wellbeing, other species, and our planet.

When we consider what futures are possible, they tend to direct us to visions of either a shiny, frictionless world which is light and bright, or at the other end of the spectrum they are fearsome, shadowy dystopias. This book reclaims darkness to think through alternative futures which are neither environmentally catastrophic nor technologically evangelical.

Dark Futures proposes a new philosophy, in which darkness is embraced as an emancipatory space for positive thought and creative expression. By revealing fresh ideologies that can empower sustainable and ethical relationships with our ecologies and our technologies, this book sets out a new vision for the futures of collective life.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Manuel Garcia-Ruiz (March 20, 2025). Dark Futures: When the Lights Go Down. International Night Studies Network. Retrieved April 30, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13j5r


Manuel Garcia-Ruiz

He is a PhD Scholar at CIES-Iscte and a Research Collaborator at IS-FLUP. He research on topics such as city branding, cultural regeneration, the commodification of arts and culture, art washing, and the construction of artistic fields.