We invite artists, collectives, and practice-based researchers to propose works for (Re)Imagining the Homunculus: Bodies, Senses, and Imaginary Machines, an exhibition exploring how human, nonhuman, artificial, and speculative sensoriums are organized.

The exhibition brings together two figures: the intelligence enclosed in a glass phial in Goethe’s Faust II and the sensory homunculus – the distorted figure used to visualize how the human body is represented within the somatosensory cortex.

We welcome proposals for new works, adaptations, and relevant existing works that explore different modes of sensing, alternative organizations of the sensorium, translations between sensory modalities, and imaginary technologies of perception and knowledge. AI and machine perception are among the possible areas of investigation but are not a required focus.

Proposals must be submitted by 20 September 2026, 23:59 CEST, through the application form at XXXX.

Exhibition: 24 February–7 March 2027
Opening: 24 February 2027
Workshop: 24–25 February 2027
Location: One or more venues in Frankfurt am Main. The precise location or locations are currently being determined and will be announced in autumn 2026.

Exhibition concept

In the laboratory scene of Goethe’s Faust II (1832), Wagner produces a Homunculus inside a glass phial. The resulting artificial intelligence speaks immediately, reasons independently, advises its creators, and interprets Faust’s dream by hovering over and illuminating him. Wagner anticipates that an artificially produced brain designed to think will eventually produce a thinker.

Almost two centuries before contemporary AI, Goethe imagined cognition as something technically produced, enclosed within an artificial environment, and capable of exceeding its creator’s intentions. Presenting this figure in Frankfurt – the city where Goethe was born in 1749 – allows the exhibition to connect the city’s literary history with contemporary questions about perception, intelligence, embodiment, and technology.

The sensory homunculus offers another artificial body. In this scientific visualization, the proportions of the human figure correspond not to physical anatomy but to the cortical representation devoted to sensory information from different parts of the body. Its enlarged hands, lips, and tongue make an otherwise invisible organization of perception visible.

One homunculus presents an artificial intelligence in search of embodiment. The other presents an artificial body constructed from a map of sensation. Together, they raise questions about how intelligence acquires a body, how bodies become maps, and how particular sensory arrangements produce particular worlds.

A sensorium is not simply a collection of individual senses. It is an organization through which sensations are selected, weighted, combined, and interpreted. Human sensoriums are shaped by biological capacities but also by languages, cultural practices, technologies, institutions, and environments.

The exhibition seeks to move beyond the familiar hierarchy of sight and hearing. It invites attention to touch, smell, taste, temperature, pain, balance, proprioception, interoception, vibration, spatial orientation, and other modes through which bodies encounter their surroundings. It is equally interested in nonhuman sensing, including chemical, electrical, magnetic, ecological, and collective forms of perception.

Technologies can extend, reorganize, or translate among these modes: electromagnetic fields become sound, movement becomes data, touch becomes instruction, and environmental changes become images. Contemporary AI introduces another possible sensorium, constructed through sensors, datasets, classifications, and computational models. Yet machine perception is only one instance within the exhibition’s broader inquiry into how sensory worlds are made.

What would alternative sensory homunculi look like? Which parts of experience would they enlarge, suppress, translate, or exclude? Could a sensorium be distributed across several bodies, species, machines, or environments? What forms of knowledge might become possible if the senses were organized differently?

Imaginary epistemic devices and MultiCom

The exhibition is developed within Imaginary Multimodal Machines, a project building the digital Archive of Imaginary Epistemic Devices. The archive brings together fictional, speculative, metaphorical, magical, and unrealized devices for producing, organizing, communicating, visualizing, remembering, and predicting knowledge.

Such devices reveal how different cultures and historical periods understand perception, intelligence, communication, and technological possibility. The Homunculus is one example within this broader history of imaginary machines.

The project forms part of Multimodal Communication (MultiCom), a Goethe University Frankfurt research focus that understands communication as inherently multimodal and promotes exchange among linguistics, media studies, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, musicology, computer science, and related fields.

The exhibition extends these questions into a spatial, sensory, and artistic environment. It considers interfaces as relations among different forms of perception, representation, and action: between image and language, sound and space, gesture and command, body and data, observer and system.

Artistic framework

Contributions may respond directly to Goethe’s Homunculus, engage with another historical or fictional device, bring several sources into relation, or invent an entirely new sensory or epistemic technology.

Possible subjects include:

• Alternative maps of the body and sensorium

• Touch, smell, taste, temperature, balance, pain, and bodily orientation

• Proprioceptive and interoceptive experience

• Synesthesia and translation among sensory modalities

• Nonhuman, ecological, and collective forms of perception

• Imaginary senses and speculative sensory organs

• Sensory access and unequal access to knowledge

• Dreams, memory, imagination, and altered perception

• Devices that make invisible forces perceptible

• Artificial intelligence and machine perception

• Machine error, hallucination, ambiguity, and noise

New works, adaptations, and relevant existing works may all be considered. Contributions may include painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, digital and networked art, video, animation, sound art, text- or diagram-based work, and hybrid forms.

Technical complexity is not a requirement. Proposals do not need to respond directly to Goethe or employ AI.

Exhibition, website, and workshop

Each selected work will also be documented as part of the digital Archive of Imaginary Epistemic Devices at arch-ime.de. In consultation with the artist, the website will present an illustrated entry describing the work and its relationship to the exhibition’s questions.

Selected artists will be invited to participate in the Goethe University workshop on 24–25 February 2027 and exchange ideas with the participating researchers. Participation is welcomed but is not a condition of exhibition selection. Scholars participating in the workshop will be invited to the exhibition opening on 24 February.

The exhibition and workshop are connected but remain distinct parts of the project. The exhibition is a public artistic presentation with its own curatorial selection and spatial form. The workshop is a separate research meeting concerned with paradigms for describing imaginary machines, the role of technological imagination, differences among national and cultural traditions, and gaps in the history of imagined information-processing devices.

How to apply

Please submit the following through the application form at XXXX:

• A description of the proposed or existing work, including a short explanation of its relationship to the exhibition concept, up to 500 words

• Photographs, sketches, video links, or other media, if needed

• A brief biography or CV

• Preliminary technical and spatial requirements

• An indicative production and presentation budget, if applicable

Applications may be submitted in English or German. Contact information for questions will be published on XXXX.

Timeline

Publication of the open call: 6 August 2026
Application deadline: 20 September 2026, 23:59 CEST
Notification of applicants: 10 October 2026
Development and preparation period: November 2026–February 2027
Delivery and installation: 22–23 February 2027
Exhibition opening: 24 February 2027
Workshop at Goethe University: 24–25 February 2027
Exhibition: 24 February–7 March 2027
Deinstallation: 8 March 2027

Organization and contact

The exhibition is organized and managed by WAHRTA e.V., a Frankfurt-based association active in cultural, educational, and artistic initiatives.

Main organizer: Andrey Logutov
Curator: Ludmila Razgulina
Contact and application form: XXXX