T+U (Technologie und das Unheimliche) is a publishing project and cross-disciplinary movement based in Berlin, Budapest, and Leipzig. It was initiated by Mark Fridvalszki, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi and Solitude fellow Márió Z. Nemes. T+U aims to encompass the cultural phenomena that result from the confrontation between conditio humana and technology by thematic issues and related projects. With regards to this mission, T+U mediates between cultural technologies within the context of post-digitality, and tries to contaminate para-academic thinking with artistic tactics.
The upcoming issue of Technologie und das Unheimliche will focus on the confrontation of mysteries and cultural paranoia. In order to unfold this multilayered phenomenon, we intend to use the notorious cipher machine Enigma as a super-metaphor for the technological uncanny that constantly irritates the dominance of enlightenment, humanism, and scientific optimism. From a mere device, the machine becomes a bizarre counterpart of humankind at the dawn of the 21st century and rewrites the dominant anthropocentric worldview. As in vital technology, the boundaries between human software and material hardware utterly collapse. It is not just the death of God, nor of humans, but of the machine. No Big Bang repeats itself within futuristic categories. There is no eschaton and/or finale. Bios and tekhné pervade each other at the absent hearth of the truth.
Within this technological and epistemological shift, even the competence over the explanatory system is questionable since subhuman systems are to become their own parsers. Therefore, hermeneutics (the decoding of the world’s secret for the benefit of humanity) is over. Instead, paranoia becomes the paradigmatic cultural technique, which does seek to hide anything, only to write itself along ritual intimations into an acentric world. In this sense, Enigma as a discursive object is capable of opening up our imagination to a new field where the irrational, the paranormal, and the extraordinary are not colonized by rigid calculations, but indeed stem from the inland of the computational system.
Text by Mark Fridvalszki, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi, and Márió Z. Nemes.