This talk examines some histories of relations with the night sky as a way of thinking through histories of aesthetics and politics. Aesthetics is thinking about beauty and the senses. Beauty extends to the loveliness of the starry night. Senses extend beyond the narrow range of the five senses. Before the domestication of fire, quite possibly before language, the night sky enthralled and overwhelmed ancestors, drove them underground, and framed their first forays into art. This paper imagines star-gazing as cultural motif and political management. Once the meeting place of humans, gods and ancestors, the night sky became by turns a constellation of objects for religious, instrumental and scientific instruction. A more-than-human aesthetic politics begins in awe, considers objectivity and subjectivity and, drawing on indigenous wisdom, begins the task of healing the rifts between humans, ancestors and ecologies.

Seán Cubitt is Professorial Fellow of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include Ecomedia, The Cinema Effect, The Practice of Light, Finite Media, Anecdotal Evidence, and two volumes on aesthetic politics, Truth and Good. He researches ecocritical approaches to the history and philosophy of media.