André Rottman
Lecture, October 7, 2026

The Digital Unconscious: Notes on Contemporary Art after Surrealism

Offering a series of case studies and close readings, respectively, of works and writings by Adrián Villar-Rojas, Hito Steyerl, Friedrich A. Kittler, N. Katherine Hayles, Antonio Somaini and, most notably, Pierre Huyghe, this lecture argues that the use of so-called “Artificial Intelligence” in salient practices of contemporary art in the 2020s has been yielding manifestations of the “digital unconscious”, understood as the pre-reflective field where bodies and computation meet in ways that are chaotic and desolate, but also semiotic, ludic, and fertile. Mining the legacies of Surrealism’s mythical quest for both the marvelous and the uncanny with recourse to various unconscious (or rather technological “non-conscious”) automatisms, these practices arguably complicate this avant-garde movement’s legacies today by eliciting indeterminate states of being at the intersections of the human and nonhuman. Turning to such AI-induced allegories of a human mind whose imaginative capacities are inflected and infected, or even voided and annihilated by code in the latent spaces of “machine learning”, the question to be prompted not the least concerns the poetics and politics of art in computational culture.

André Rottmann is a Berlin-based art historian who has been Professor for Art and Media Theory at Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, since 2022. His writings on contemporary art and theory have appeared in journals like OCTOBER, Grey Room, Artforum and Texte zur Kunst as well as in catalogues of museums and exhibitions (for example the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Kunstmuseum Basel, Migros Museum Zurich and Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017). His recent publications include the monograph Isa Genzken. Fuck the Bauhaus (Afterall One Works Series/The MIT Press, 2024), two essays on Gerhard Richter’s (early and later) photo-based paintings included in the catalogue accompanying the artist’s retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (Citadelles & Mazenod, 2025) and the anthology Pierre Huyghe. October File (The MIT Press, 2026). He currently is completing a book manuscript on the art of John Knight.

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