Zones of Unknowing, or the Experiencing of Inhuman Encounters

Abstract Installation art and the curation of immersive experiential environments occupy a recognizable position within the broader field of relations between art and ecological thought, thanks to their emphasis on direct experience. This essay looks at two recent projects: Gian Maria Tosatti’s History of the Night and Destiny of the Comets (2022) and Pierre Huyghe’s Liminal (2024). Their approaches converge toward complementary encounters with the inhuman: the speculation of permanent human extinction—or disanthropy—and the emergence of non-human witnessing. This essay analyzes their work as different configurations of “zones of unknowing”: spaces that are defined by strategic indeterminacy and open-ended experiential conditions. The analysis moves beyond viewing these works as devices for visualizing hyperobjects, finding further potential in their ability to manifest zones where visitors encounter modes of existence that exceed human understanding. While Tosatti’s forensic imaginary stages a proleptic encounter with human absence, Huyghe’s work functions as a cyber-physical system where sensors, computational processes, and robotic movements are integrated into continuous feedback loops. The act of unknowing operates as undoing, or unlearning, and as a confrontation with the limits of human mastery. Encounters facilitated by emerging technologies of the inhuman that induce states of ontological porosity. By bridging environmental humanities scholarship with art theory and art-historical discourse, the essay focuses on how these spaces function through bodily presence, briefly examining an earlier historical lineage in the work of Gino De Dominicis.