Going dark : care-full castings and delight-full deviations for a networked fiction in an everyday world

Abstract

Going dark is a technical term within the world of theatre. It has the double meaning of lights out during rehearsal and a temporary venue closure for maintenance and resetting. In this way it speaks to matters of care in the form of attending to one's environs while resisting the excess of twenty-four hour productivity. This thesis appropriates going dark as a practice and methodology. In both instances it considers how deviation from the familiar; steady observation; and a kind of slow liveliness might reveal delight-full throughways for a less human-centric worlding. This project emerges from a confluence of driving commitments-digital media, the dark, and speculative fiction - embedded in the habitual and affective processes of everyday activities. Each concern additionally has the capacity to disturb the mundane in ordinary and extraordinary ways. How then might such an everyday landscape be harnessed to explore speculative projects embedded in the digital fabric of social media as a type of textual creative resistance? To assist me in this enquiry I travel along the submerged pathways of stinkhorn fungi, lively soil, and social media networks in conversation with the experimental online project Going DARK. Engaging a fictocritical framework I draw sustenance from the disruptive practices of feminist science fiction writers and look to the messy earth-bound provocations of Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa. Threaded below the carefully composed registers are the influential figurations of Rosi Braidotti's nomadic subject and the processes of becoming and assemblage engaged in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Consequently my thesis travels multiple lines of curious deviation to inform, borrow, expand or temporarily submerge a story. Viewed through a posthuman lens it seeks to find delight and direction in the inbetween dark and dirty spaces. Equally it is an endeavor to interrupt the off-world utopian dream embedded in idealistic paternal views of escape to another planet in order to make us accountable for our actions on the world we are in now.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English