One Acquainted with the Night

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This tour began with a transition into the uncharted territory of shadows, shifts and spectres. The tunnel is used once more to transition the participant out of the uncanny landscape, back into a known context of ordered, visible and transparent urban space. The return to the tunnel makes visible how no two spatial encounters can produce the same effects or affects. Spaces cannot remain as we first encountered them, and their meanings – familiar, unfamiliar and intangible - are produced in state of flux. During the course of this tour, as much as the participant has not ‘seen’, they themselves have been part of this ‘unseen’ landscape and perhaps experienced a freedom from being unnoticed in the visual field of others. As a subjective and shifting force, the uncanny likewise remains hidden in the shadows, resistant to constant visibility. To this end, there can be no one fixed narrative about the urban uncanny in the context of the night. It is multivalent and ambiguous. Rather, through practicing the city in a gesture of uncertainty, the participant has been, as the poet Robert Frost once wrote, ‘one acquainted with the night’.