Year(s) of the Uncanny

Prior to 2020, Das Unheimliche, wouldn’t come up in idle conversation. Nowadays, everyone, everywhere, had experienced the unsettling feeling of the strangely familiar, the horrors of the ordinary - becoming strange, we all felt the Uncanny in the flesh. It’s all around us - in our haunted homes, beaming from our screens day and night, in the empty streets of our mutated cities. It’s in the fabric of everyday life, in the sudden strangeness of daily routines. Dread that isn’t evoked by otherness, anxiety not triggered by alienation, fear of something that’s not external...  It’s coming from inside the house! Could the Uncanny be the new dominant fear, in the soon to be “new normal” times? not fear of an unknown other, but fear of an unknowable self? We’ll present a few perspectives on the Uncanny, including a deep dive into the current state of deep fakes and the possible near-end of the Uncanny Valley, talk about how repressing Uncanny fears got soccer moms involved in QAnon, discuss the eerie politics of our homes and bodies - transformed into battlegrounds. We’ll do so from the empty, eerie, uncanny places of different locations and times. 5-6 flash talks, each 3-4 minutes, each presenting one idea briefly, recorded by each speaker from a different urban-eerie (uncanny) location, intercut with videos and images taken through the pandemic year of our empty cities, edited with a brief intro (by Eden Kupermintz & Uri Aviv), and offering a lengthier online discussion in our decentral event.