Planet Uncanny: Redistributing Subjectivities across Technology, Nature, and Society.

The boundaries of the Uncanny Valley are increasingly blurred. Today, AI systems generate texts, images, and films largely autonomously. In parallel, scientific research continues to reveal the cognitive abilities of plants. Yet debates on the Anthropocene show that the feeling of the uncanny is not confined to a valley where humans, machines, and plants meet. Rather, the Earth itself emerges as an actor in its own right – less a home than a source of uncertainty and disorientation.
This transdisciplinary conference explores the redistribution of subjectivity across technology, nature, and society from multiple perspectives. Five fields of emergence (divination, imagination, repetition, transition, and substitution), all defined in relation to Freud's study of »The Uncanny,« serve as points of departure. Providing the setting for the conference, an installation at the Bauhaus Museum – incorporating artworks, objects, and materials – introduces these fields. In addition, a curated collection of texts, images, and film clips documents the transformation of ideas and sensations associated with the new machinic reality of the early 20th century.

Conference
December 3–5, 2025

Didier Debaise, Daniel Falb, Vanessa Farfán, Orit Halpern, N. Katherine Hayles, David Howes, Yuk Hui, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Robert Mitchell, Simone Natale, Juliane Rebentisch, Tom Sanya, Sandra Schäfer, Henning Schmidgen, Mathias Schönher, Aleksandra Selivanova, Danni Shen, Andrey Smirnov, Julia Katharina Thiemann, Anton Vidokle, Elena Vogman, and Margarete Vöhringer

Exhibition
December 1–8, 2025
Historical Context
Hans Bellmer, Karel Čapek, Alexei Gastev, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, Ishirō Honda, Fritz Kahn, Kliment Redko, Pavel Tchelitchew, Lev Theremin, among others

Contemporary Artists
Jenny Brockmann, Patricia Domínguez, Mario Gooden, Michael Johansson, Grace Ndiritu, Tao Ya-Lun, Ayoung Yu and Nicholas Oh, among others

PROGRAM
Wednesday, December 3
13:30
Henning Schmidgen
Welcome and Introduction

IMAGINATION
13:45
Daniel Falb
»Animism's Second Coming: Socializing AI«
14:30
Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell
»The Planetary Experiment: A History and Theory of Science at Scale«

15:30 Coffee Break

DIVINATION
16:00
Simone Natale
»Talking to Non-Stochastic Parrots«
16:45
Vanessa Farfán
»Beyond the Uncanny: An Artistic Field«

17:30 Coffee Break

18:00
N. Katherine Hayles
Keynote Lecture
»Analog Lifeworlds: How Organisms Evolved Analog Computing to Construct Their Worlds – Then Humans Reinvented It«

19:30 Reception

Thursday, December 4

REPETITION
9:30
Juliane Rebentisch
»The Reality of Ghosts: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene«
10:15
Mathias Schönher
»Distributed Proto-Subjectivity: The Animism of Félix Guattari«

11:00 Coffee Break

11:30
Anton Vidokle
»Notes on Aesthetics of Spiritualism«

12:15 Lunch

SUBSTITUTION
14:30
Jenny Brockmann and Julia Katharina Thiemann
Tour of the Installation

15:15 Coffee Break

15:45
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
»Making Generations«
16:30
Didier Debaise
»Earthbound Subjectivities: From Nature to Non-Human Subjectivities in Bruno Latour«

17:15 Coffee Break

18:00
Evening Talk and Discussion
Sandra Schäfer, Aleksandra Selivanova, Andrey Smirnov, Elena Vogman, and Margarete Vöhringer
»Working Body, Breaking Body: Biomechanics, Prosthetics, Robots, ca. 1920«

Friday, December 5

TRANSITION 1
9:30
David Howes
»Pushing the Bounds of Sense: Expanding on the Notion of ›The Sixth Sense‹«
10:15
Danni Shen
»Chimeric Embodiment: Posthumanism, Contemporary Art, Embodiment, Spirituality«

11:00 Coffee Break

TRANSITION 2
11:30
Tom Sanya
»The Edifice and Its Haunting Absence«
12:15
Yuk Hui
TBA

13:00 Farewell