Creating new art and theory to take on the biggest, chillest voids in human meaning and culture... in a universe of two trillion galaxies.

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"MEDIA THEORY TURNS COOL"

Formerly titled: "Thus Spoke the Cool: Dark Skies, Earthworks, and a New Media Art" (Publisher wanted more uniform titles for the essays)

by Barry Vacker and Kelly Bartsch

In Charlie Gere and Francesca Franco (ed.), Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Art (London 2025).

ABSTRACT

From the remote regions of the Texas-Mexico border to the vast cosmos of NASA and ESA, this essay theorizes a profound connection between the Dark Skies movement, the monumental Earthworks in the American deserts, and the proliferation of telescopes around the planet. Combining Friedrich Nietzsche with Julia Hildebrand's and Barry Vacker's cool media theory, this essay theorizes Earthworks (also called "land art") and telescopes as forms of Nietzschean new media art and technology, co-evolving in the deserts and dark skies of America and the world. Earthworks and telescopes cast our gaze out and away from ourselves, away from civilization, into desert galleries with distant walls of vistas and ceilings of starry skies-perfect for experiencing the sublime. Nietzschean new media art speaks the cool, the chilly abyss of dark skies beyond city skyglow, where the cool gaze confronts the light pollution of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system.

Essay link