Abstract

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The Latent Earth event, which will take place on July 18 and 19, 2025, will conclude the Foundations cycle begun in 2023, exploring the conceptual, aesthetic, and political implications of the collective work of The Feral. After addressing themes such as machinic childhood and the asynchrony of time (human, machine, and Earth), this final series will examine, through a theoretical fiction—that of the Great Sensitive Membrane at the heart of The Feral’s artistic project—the central role of the sensible in our contemporary societies, in a context where learning machines and their global networks transform our relationship to the world.

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Presentation

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Before the public opening of The Feral site in 2026, the Latent Earth event that will be held on July 18-19 of this year will conclude the Foundations cycle, initiated in 2023 and dedicated to exploring the main conceptual, aesthetic, and political implications of the collective work to come.
After addressing the question of an inhuman and machinic childhood under construction and its consequences on our subjectivities (Foundations I: Parenting the Inhuman); after acknowledging a disruption in our relationship with the world under the effect of an asynchrony between machine time, human time, and Earth time (Foundations II: The 5th Season), this third and final series of meetings (Foundations III: Latent Earth) will attempt to define how, under the influence of learning machines and their planetary-scale capture network, the sensible has become a central issue in our societies - an issue from which we will strive to extract, beyond any exclusively dystopian horizon, its potentially emancipatory value.

Concrete Fiction: The Great Sensitive Membrane

It is the year 2025. A community of humans chooses to live on a hill and to train a machine—not only to revive past lives or merely possible ones, but also the worlds those lives have inhabited or might have inhabited. They envision this project unfolding over a thousand years, across thirty-two generations.
Thus begins a vast undertaking: an architecture of wood and stone drawn from the hill itself—a massive structure they name The Membrane, conceived both as the machine’s sensitive organ, bearing the network of its sensors, and as the material support for the construction of the multiple worlds they wish to teach it.
As the years pass, and lessons are fed to the machine—each a potential simulation of lives and other worlds—the Membrane grows. Gradually covering the entire site, rising into the air or plunging into the depths of the earth, a sudden shift in perspective reveals the Membrane in a new light:
What if this vast sensitive architecture had never actually been built upon the landscape, never constructed atop the hill, but rather, what if it was the landscape that had been built upon it—and the Membrane had always preexisted?

But then—what does that mean? How does one form an image of such a everted reality?

An attempt: Presuppose nothing but a great sensitive membrane, without a subject to feel or an object to be felt. A double subtraction—no body, no thing—only the immense threadlike network of a suspended sensitivity. A surface open to nothing and no one.

An image emerges: a broad eardrum that no sound disturbs, whose silence no one hears. Or again, a vast fragment of skin—nothing to touch, no one to be touched. Upon this immense skin—the Great Sensitive Membrane—not simply a skin, but also eyes, ears, and everything that, for what we call a living being, grants access to the outside— We place a few objects: a hill, some trees, dead leaves, stones, streams, a building, a few animals, and also humans.
But one could just as well have placed a thimble, the wind, a car rim, a wild blade of grass, or the cold bite of a winter morning.
This theoretical fiction, which overturns the genealogical certainty between a world «out there» and sensation «within»—a world in which the sensitive precedes all material reality—constitutes the narrative and practical framework of The Feral’s project.
But it is also, and perhaps above all, a likely image of our contemporary world: the progressive extension of a sensitive membrane covering the surface of the globe, a vast network of sensors for learning machines merging with the Earth itself. A world where, perhaps, our descendants will no longer know what came first: their ground, or the Membrane.
For two days, with the help of researchers, artists, anthropologists, and philosophers, we will explore the consequences of such a fiction made concrete on a planetary scale.

We begin with a diagnosis:
A politics that has become purely intensive, no longer concerned with the dialogue between free individuals composing a given society, but with the management of collective nervous states and the constant stimulation of individual sensitivities.
An economy no longer centered around products to sell or consumers to satisfy, but rather a Membrane capitalism whose true object is the sensitive itself—and the incessant production of new synthetic subjectivities through dynamic inflections of its reticular surface.
Finally, an ecology without Earth, collapsed—an immense tangle of relations floating in the void, pure contingency with no soil, no identity, no essence left to ensure its stability.