Uncanny Aesthetics

Abstract

Uncanny aesthetics examines how the discourse of the uncanny emerged from a reading of E. T. A Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman,” in the works of Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, and how these readings have shaped the way we think about the uncanny as both experiential and aesthetic. These interpretations demonstrate, as Samuel Weber puts it, “a certain indecidability” between what we personally experience and what is predetermined. The uncanny has, however, shifted from a fear of confronting unhuman objects to the fear of being exposed to others beyond the devices and programs with which we have intimate relations, and the existential crisis of not measuring up to the technologies that simulate us.

The emergence of autolography: the ‘magical’ invocation of images from text through AI

“…This term describes how the digital can unsettle cultural and cognitive expectations, but not necessarily coherently or consistently. As Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli points out, the uncanny is ‘intangible – an aesthetic experience that is not fully empirically describable’ (2019: 8). The digital uncanny ‘unsettles and estranges concepts of ‘self’, ‘affect’, ‘feedback’ and ‘aesthetic experience’, forcing us to reflect on our relationships with computational media’ (15).…”