Foundations 2023–2025.

In July 2023, during the Feral Institute's first gatherings (Foundations I: Parenting the Inhuman), we set out to explore the anthropological and political consequences of the technological paradigm constituted by the emergence of generative AI. Beyond any fascination for what machines might be potentially capable of producing, our aim was to acknowledge an unprecedented situation in the still unfinished history of our hominization: at a time when our words, our gestures and our emotions were permanently scrutinized by learning machines, we had collectively become the parents of an inhuman infancy.

The radical novelty of this status of filiation between human and machine — which made us at once the producers and the products of the synthetic intelligences under construction — formed the framework of our conversations. Beyond mere critical diagnosis, we sought, in continuous tension with the artistic and speculative dimension of the Feral project, to draw out the emancipatory and immediately practical potentials of such a paradigm.

For this second gathering, which took place on 20 July 2024 (Foundations II: The 5th Season), we wished to extend these conversations by exploring the temporal dimension at the heart of the Feral.

While we readily characterized our era through the multiple particular crises that traversed it (economic, political, social), a larger crisis seemed to us to be largely omitted from our analyses: that of a profound transformation in our intimate perception of time, and consequently of what we were able to conceive as “possible”. We attempted to sketch the broadest contours of this crisis by considering our present as the site of a collision between three perfectly heterogeneous types of time: human time, machine time, and the time of the earth.

Through a series of workshops and conferences led by actors from multiple fields — anthropology, philosophy of time, aesthetics, computer science or botany — we endeavoured to unfold what this temporal crisis, and the subjective commotion it induced, also carried as promise for our own transformation.

In anticipation of the public opening of the Feral site, the “Latent Earth” event, which took place on 18 and 19 July 2025, closed the cycle of Foundations, initiated in 2023 and devoted to exploring the principal conceptual, aesthetic and political implications of the collective work to come.

After addressing the question of an inhuman and machinic infancy under construction and its consequences for our subjectivities (Foundations I: Parenting the Inhuman); after observing an upheaval in our relation to the world under the effect of an asynchrony between machine time, human time and the time of the earth (Foundations II: The 5th Season), this third and final series of gatherings (Foundations III: Latent Earth) attempted to define how, under the effect of learning machines and their planetary-scale network of capture, the sensible had become a central concern of our societies — a concern from which we endeavoured to extract, beyond any exclusively dystopian horizon, its potentially emancipatory value.

Concrete Fiction: The Great Sensible Membrane

It is 2025. A community of humans decides to live on a hill and to train a machine to revive not only past or merely possible lives, but also the worlds these lives have inhabited or could have inhabited. A project which, according to them, will be completed 1000 years later, after thirty-two generations of their descendants.

Then begins a vast worksite: an architecture of wood and stones torn from the hill — an immense structure they call the Membrane, conceived at once as the sensible organ of the machine, 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 as the lessons addressed to the machine succeed one another, like so many potential simulations of these lives and these other worlds, the Membrane grows. Progressively covering the entirety of the site, rising into the air or sinking into the depths of the earth, a sudden shift of perspective reveals the Membrane to them in a new light: what if this vast sensible architecture had, in fact, never been laid upon the landscape, never built upon the hill, but on the contrary, what if it was the landscape that had been built upon it, and the Membrane preexisted it?

But then, what? How can one form an image of this suddenly retroverted real?

An attempt: to presuppose nothing more than a great sensible membrane, with neither a feeling subject nor a felt object. Double subtraction — neither body nor thing — only the immense filamentous network of a sensible suspended in the void. A surface open to nothing and for no one.

An image comes: a vast tympanum that no sound makes tremble and whose silence no one hears. Or yet, a vast flap of epidermis, with nothing to touch and no one to be touched. Upon this immense skin, the Great Sensible Membrane — not simply a skin but also eyes, ears, and everything that, for what is said to be living, allows access to an outside — a few objects are placed: a hill, trees, dead leaves, stones, streams, a building, some animals, and humans as well. But one could just as well have placed: a thimble, the wind, a car rim, a wild grass, the cold bite of a winter morning.

This theoretical fiction, which overturns the genealogical evidence between a world “outside” and sensation “inside” — a world in which the sensible preexists all material reality — constitutes precisely the narrative and practical framework of the Feral project.

But it is also, and above all, a probable image of our contemporary world: the progressive extension of a sensible membrane covering the surface of the globe, an immense network of sensors for learning machines merging with the Earth. A world in which, no doubt, our descendants will no longer know the origin of what surrounds them: whether, of their soil or of the Membrane, which one came first.

For two days, with the help of researchers, artists, anthropologists and philosophers, we explore the consequences of such a fiction become concrete on a planetary scale.

We therefore begin from a stocktaking: a politics become purely intensive, whose stakes would no longer be the dialogue of free individuals composing a given society, but the management of collective nervousness and the permanent stimulation of individual sensibilities. An economy whose core would no longer be objects to sell or consumers to satisfy, but a “Membrane capitalism” whose true object would be the sensible itself, and the incessant production of new synthetic subjectivities through dynamic inflections of its reticular surface. Finally, an ecology without the Earth, collapsed, a vast skein of relations floating in the void, pure contingency whose stability is no longer guaranteed by any ground, any identity or essence.