ABSTRACT
Artificial darkness is a technology of controlled darkness that emerged in nineteenth-century darkened theaters, photographic darkrooms, and the ‘black screen,’ the forerunner of contemporary green screen technologies. Its rise and fall as a major media technology from the mid-nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century rarely intersected with the history of race. But in the last several decades, artists like Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, and Hito Steyerl have mobilized obsolete as well as revitalized techniques of artificial darkness—from tempera painting to Pepper’s Ghost and green screen video—in order to question the politics and aesthetics of visibility and invisibility, ‘natural’ and artificial darkness, and the enduring importance of race for histories and practices of art and media. This essay extends Elcott’s award-winning book Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2016/2018) to engage questions of race in contemporary art practice.
