ABSTRACT
Forensic culture’s economy of legibility purports to order the very chaos it constructs: the proliferation of information. Going Dark juxtaposes cosmologist Maxwell’s planetarium demonstrations of how the universe is ‘going dark’ as it expands further and farther with hallucinations and diminished vision experienced by Max as he suffers the onset of retinitis pigmentosa. One of the constants across epistemological crises in different eras and in different cultures is the sense, to quote Max, that ‘there is no fixed point’ at which to locate oneself. Initially conceiving language through a logical-positivist lens, as data-driven, Wittgenstein came to see language as context-driven. Finding new ways to present and communicate data, to sound through the blizzard of competing data packages, is big business: attention is currency. The logic of informatics that governs the economy of legibility compels all things to be machine-manageable information commodities: data. Turning things into data entails abstraction and virtualisation.
