Susan Schuppli - Dark Matters: Bearing Material Witness to Climate Change

Free admission In her keynote lecture Dark Matters: Bearing Material Witness to Climate Change Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept, that of the ‘Material Witness’. This is an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events as well as exposing the practices and procedures that enable such materials to testify publically. Material witnesses are non-human entities and mechanic ecologies that archive their complex interactions with the world. Within the context of the Dark Ecology lecture she focuses specifically upon the ways in which the transformations brought about by industrial pollutants and global warming are creating new material witnesses out of the chemistry of sunlight, ice and snow and explore the ways in which these emergent toxic ecologies might operate as evidential agents that can testify to contested events.