What’s darkmatter about?
Our first own blog post…
Currently, this site is still undergoing beta-testing - isn’t anything designated web2.01 these days in perpetual beta? The site’s working (more or less!) and we thought it’s better to go live now.
There are still a few technical issues to test out, but Registration and Newsletter Subscription are fine to use. Of course, if you find something that doesn’t appear to work, please drop us a line via the Contact page. For further info, see the About page.
darkmatter operates both as a journal and a blog ‘commons space’. Maybe a bit confusing, so expect a slight re-design of the site, which will make navigation easier
— Update (12 Apr): new site design has been uploaded —
You may be wondering why we’ve called our site darkmatter? Well, not to be directly confused with the astrophysics term of dark matter energy. Nonetheless, given that this definition involves ‘not directly observed and of unknown composition’, it’s not difficult to make connections with the discrepant operations of ‘race’ in contemporary life.2 But we like another definition of darkmatter: the invisible web which seemingly is excluded from search engines.
Thus, darkmatter has been developed to address how issues of ‘race’ and related cultural critique are either marginalized/silenced on the web; or so dispersed that it’s difficult to track debates. We’re not bothered with mission statements as the darkmatter project will be emergent - watch this space.
- ↑1 For a good critique of the capitalist ideology of web2.0 see the Mute magazine article by Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick
- ↑2 We were also inspired by the anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000), edited by S.R. Thomas - see here for a discussion. Also check this article, deploying dark matter for thinking through cultural resistance and activism
For some further ruminations on ‘dark matter’, this time as a metaphor for the deep raciological structuring of Enlightenment philosophy, see the chapter ‘Dark Ontologies: Blacks, Jews and White Supremacy’ in Charles W. Mills (1998) Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithica and London: Cornell University Press. pp. 67-95.