(PhD Integrative Seminar, Co-taught with Lana Lin)

In 1919 Freud published a wide-ranging essay on the “uncanny,” which he names as an aesthetic quality of feeling that is a special species of fear. Female genital organs, prostheses, automatons, doppelgangers, and haunted houses are uncanny. Today, as new media techniques push the boundary of the uncanny into domains such as Virtual Reality, “fake news,” and data doubles, the uncanny has come to characterize our age of recombination. The uncanny is always bound up with uncertainty as to whether something is an original or a copy, animate or inanimate, alive or dead. It cuts across design, politics, culture, media, literature, and social theory. This course will track the uncanny as the term proliferates across multiple disciplines, from psychoanalysis to socio-cultural analysis, from aesthetics to design methodologies. We will pay special attention to questions that suture the practice of design to the big questions of the humanities: What distinguishes appropriation from innovation? Why do certain forms of reproduction and mimesis seem so perennially unsettling? How are our interactions with humans and non-humans marked by a sense of the foreign-ness of the other, whether that takes place in the individual psyche, the built environment, or the nation-state? We will follow these questions to speculate upon how the uncanny dwells in trauma, infiltrates politics, and reproduces contemporary forms of life. Participation in this seminar will help students identify uncanny trends in their respective fields and/or produce creative work that leverages the uncanny.