Whispers of a Fibre Optic Cable — Technogenic Echoes as Eerie Technofutures in Wilke Weermann’s Unheim

In his play Unheim, Wilke Weermann envisions a dystopian future shaped by imaginative forms of interplay between humans and smart technologies: smart homes are inhabited by ghosts in the form of previous residents that have imprinted themselves into the home’s technologies by interacting with it. The home continues to produce technological acts as if the human would still be living in it, shaping itself around an absent person — and by that creating the un-home-ly notion of a ghost, as an echo of the previously human inhabitant. The phenomenon of echo appears in Unheim both traditionally as the repetition of voice as well as in the form of non-vocal acts within communicative context being replicated. In this article we aim to analyse the world presented in Unheim in regard to its contribution towards a process of meaning creation in considering certain human-technology-relations that can be opened up to hermeneutical analysis. By employing a grammatical approach towards technology, the latter can be understood as technology games (in reference to Wittgenstein’s language games) and a way we do things. It is found that in Unheim, conveyed through the notion of echo, smart home technologies perform moves that constitute a shift from a way we do things to a way things do things that is abstracted from human activity. This way things do things that is inscribed into the smart home establishes things as being autonomous in a specific way that is indifferent to humanity and therefore calls into question accountability by humans for technological developments.