Introduction
The digital uncanny emerges when we confront massive empirical datasets that have the capacity to anticipate practices, responses, experiences, and expressions that previously have been used to distinguish the human from the nonhuman—thinking, empathy, and consciousness. The film Ex-Machina illustrates how the digital uncanny emerges from personalized targeting techniques, but it cannot account for the feelings we get when we interact with computational media. Narrative cinema treats its spectators as subjects that can recognize and identify with characters and situations. While film is immersive, it is not interactive, and cannot directly address the spectator nor install her in a feedback loop. With interactive media, however, spectators are not always addressed as subjects but they remain within the sensory, within the aesthetic element. Interactive artworks bypass a human-centered perspectival mode of viewing, but, at the same time, they do not simply assume machine vision takes over human perception. They simultaneously challenge the idea of a unified subject (whether inhuman, nonhuman or posthuman) as well as notions of singularity or renewed assertions of humanism.