ABSTRACT
This chapter uses theories of the cosmic sublime to examine the rhetorical and aesthetic conventions of Tyler Nordgren’s Half the Park is After Dark, a series of tourist posters promoting dark-sky nature parks in the United States. Though night ambassadors like Nordgren have helped dispel the West’s pejorative treatment of darkness by romanticising the night, tourist advertisements often confound the public’s understanding of light pollution by obfuscating the material transformations happening to the night sky. For example, instead of attuning the astro-tourist to some of the many corporate space expansion projects transforming the night, such as the booming small satellite industry, Nordgren’s posters idealise the dark sky park as an “unchanging” and “authentic” antidote to the artificiality of urban modernity. Subsequently, as an environmental strategy, eulogising the romantic ideals of “untouched” nature is lacking. As I will show, by fetishising the starry night’s ancient qualities, Nordgren’s nostalgic treatment of the sublime deforms and dehistoricises the sky.
