Ferngesteuertes Wohnen: Die Totalüberwachung des Alltags im Smart Home

The chapter extends the concept of the uncanny to conceptualize the affective experience which arises when our most intimate space, the home, is permeated with connected sensors and new machine vision technologies. This range of experience, we argue, which is intimately linked to the current age of ubiquitous computing and smart technologies, can be understood through the category of the technological uncanny. Indeed, as the surveillant gaze of machine vision and connected technologies enters the realm of the domestic, the troubling uncertainties and ambivalences of the uncanny become omnipresent. We are immersed in the trouble of everyday surveillance 24/7. The chapter suggests that it is specifically within the realm of aesthetics that the uncanny is expressed most clearly, and the final part of the chapter examines the video installation artwork Modern Escape (2018) by artist duo Hanne Nielsen & Birgit Johnsen to explore and extend our theoretical argument. In our reading of the work, we find that Modern Escape effectively evokes feelings of the technological uncanny through a formal exploration of the automated gaze and aesthetic strategies of defamiliarization. Thus, the artwork foregrounds how the smart and connected technologies in the home bring about a constant presence of the uncanny.