Darkness Matters is a multimedia project proposed in 3 steps, each one dealing with nocturnal environments, the use of mediated forms of expression to represent them in different eras, connected to the past, nowadays’ and future aspects of light pollution.

Darkness Matters as a whole wants to create an immersive experience and make us re-embrace the starry nights, we can hardly see anymore, the Cosmos behind, the idea of infiniteness, and the symphonies of orchestras hidden in the ecosystems we can hardly hear anymore – two under-represented micro-stories of our times. Hinting lastly also to the crises of sound pollution.

As an artist, filmmaker and documentary producer, Costanza Julia Bani is interested in the reception and experience of darkness. She puts an equal weight on how to communicate her content towards an audience, to debunk the ordinary fear of darkness and have a societal impact.

The past: By researching archive material to be experienced as ar(t)cheological artifacts, Costanza Julia Bani has created imaginative reconstructions of our nights and our relationship to the universe we can see with our naked eye in an exposition on VIS#12 (The Nordic Journal of Artistic Research). The outcome is an virtual exhibition in a museum-like space, where the user can navigate from one room to another, discovering why, who, when, where and how was interested in depcting the night sky … and the fireflies. The aim is to create a IRL exhibition in an exhibition space like the Accelerator in Stockholm.

https://www.en.visjournal.nu/vis-12-costanza-julia-bani

The journey ends hic et nunc with a 2D WIP about the artist’s relation to the subject.

The present: In December 2024 the linear version, a multiscreen installation was ready. Starting from firefies in olive groves in cultural landscapes, moving up to forests and alpine meadows, following the lines of altitudinal zonations, ending up in the spectacle of the Milky Way, Darkness Matters became a visual experience around darknesses and light pollution that has been transforming our nocturnal habitat since the introduction of artificial light.

The result is a compelling example of science and research transformed into a work that directly engages our senses, combining auditory-sensory connections. In this way, it can resonate also with a young audience, bypassing the need for purely intellectual processing and speaking to them on a sensory level.

The future: 2025 Darkness Matters is out to become a collective artistic research project embedded in contemporary tech-cultures, still addressing light pollution and its impact on human and non-human perception of nocturnal environments. The collective will explore speculative audio-visual methodologies using specialized hardware (microphones and microcameras designed to capture alternative chromatic spectra) and generative AI to pre-visualize and pre-sonify potential future landscapes. Through immersive experiences in domes, both portable and static, audiences are invited to engage with a continuously evolving document informed by scientific data. This process interrogates the indexicality of documentary practices, challenging notions of truthfulness and embracing uncertainty. The piece’s trajectory offers a speculative reflection on ecological futures and fosters critical engagement with nighttime habitats. Despite extensive research on the adverse effects of artificial light at night, cultural biases persist, framing darkness as unsafe. Darkness Matters reclaims darkness as a site of discovery and ecological significance. In collaboration with Tekniska Museet and Vetenskapens Hus, to begin with, the project will be presented in venues and schools, expanding interdisciplinary discourse at the intersection of science, technology, and the arts.