PARIS.- Why are we drawn to the strange? What is it about being unsettled, haunted, or even outright disturbed that keeps pulling us back? From horror films, true crime and sci-fi to gothic novels, there’s a vast array of pop culture built around feeding our craving for unease. As these genres only seem to grow in popularity, it’s worth asking: is this simply catharsis, or is something else at play?

Many have theorized the strange and its aesthetics, starting with Freud who in 1919 defined the Uncanny as the realm of the strangely familiar, that which brings us back to something that was once known1.

More recently, Mark Fisher distinguished two main categories of cultural productions concerned with the strange, in The Weird and the Eerie2. The Weird is that which does not belong — a rupture in the familiar, something intruding that shouldn’t be there. The Eerie, meanwhile, is defined by absence and agency, the feeling of something missing that should be present, or something present that shouldn’t have a will of its own. Think of abandoned shopping malls, late-night office buildings, Kubrick’s endless hallways in The Shining — empty, but waiting.

One explanation is that these unsettling narratives offer relief from the mundane. But Fisher goes further, linking the appeal of the weird and the eerie to contemporary capitalism. Capitalism is eerie, he says: it doesn’t physically exist, yet it shapes the world, generating systemic violence, warping reality in ways we struggle to comprehend. The horror isn’t just in ghost stories but in the slow disintegration of public institutions, in the creeping disappearance of structures meant to keep us safe— education, healthcare, stability itself.

Maybe that’s why the 20th and 21st centuries have only deepened this obsession with the unsettling. We live in an era of real-time trauma, exposed to an endless stream of suffering, from historical atrocities to today’s banal yet horrifying news cycle. No wonder our cultural output reflects a world slipping further into the unknown. But these dark tales aren’t just mirrors of our fears — they’re also projections of something else. A desire for rupture, for something new. The weird and the eerie aren’t just disturbances; they are also invitations to imagine differently, to invent new modes of existing.

Randon Access Memory explores the aesthetics of the unsettling and its transgressive potential in the works of Tom Allen, Brice Dellsperger, Trisha Donnelly, Pati Hill, Ingrid Luche, Bruno Pelassy, and Torbjørn Rødland.

In a disturbing play with scale, Tom Allen’s Polished Shell appears oversized, dwarfing the landscape behind it and evoking an alien-like creature. Similarly, Trisha Donnelly’s blown-out tracings of the cracks left by a termite suggest the hidden presence of much bigger parasite. Brice Dellsperger’s pastiche of Brian de Palma’s The Black Dahlia in Body Double 23 collapses notions of identity and fiction through glitches, refracting reality. Pati Hill’s Xerographs and Bruno Pelassy’s drawings on wax exude a spectral quality, gesturing towards the ghostly imprints of past lives. Ingrid Luche’s 060919-1510 Forest Knoll films the exterior of an empty house with the cold, mechanical gaze of surveillance, turning absence into a main character. Finally, Torbjørn Rødland disturbs seemingly pristine, magazine-ready images by inserting situations of discomfort and ambiguous intent.

Through shifts in perception and subversions of identity and space, the artists in Random Access Memory tap into the pervasive alienation that defines our time. But within their distortions, there’s also the potential for something else: an opening, a fracture, an invitation to step beyond the frame.

— Justine Do Espirito Santo

1 Sigmund Freud, Das Unheimliche (The Unccany), Imago, vol. V, 1919.
2 Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 2017, ed. Repeater