Ecologies of the Night — Krista Dragomer

Ecologies of the Night, 2021-2022

In the waning light of 2020, faced with a quiet winter alone, I tuned into how the darkened, solo NYC nights affected my sensorium, and what new perceptions emerged. I made drawings, paintings and sound recordings of this new darkness. I overturned my own perceptions of figure and ground, presence and absence, questioning what it meant to perceive myself as a form at all.

Collectively, I call these works “Ecologies of the Night.” They explore the night as a challenge to this era of maximum brightness. These works push back against contemporary tech-aided refusals of darkness and approach night as an invitation to embrace uncertainty as generative, as a form of beingness that opens to new forms of necessary unknowing.

This stereo audio piece is composed of an original text by myself, a conversation between myself and Beatrice Marovich, and sound design I created by editing found and recorded sounds that I combined with original music and arrangements by Aeric Meredith-Goujon, Josh Dunn, Kensuke Shoji, and Katie Martucci. It has been published as part of the project Machines in Between.