My essay “Towards Obsolesence” about the politics of lighting and access in dance music and performance arts in issue 29 of Fine Print (2022). Read here.

The history of strobes is rooted in weapons development. In World War 2, the British military experimented with rapidly flickering bright lights to blind opponents. Stroboscopic lighting gained application in photography to document fleeting scenes like bullets flying and atomic explosions, aiding the Atomic Energy Commission’s development of nuclear weapons. In 1973 British police began testing strobes as a non-lethal crowd control weapon.