The Popular Uncanny

The TV Tropes Wiki is a useful community-built resource of common plot elements on television shows, which illustrates the high degree of scholarship and close reading that fan culture is capable of producing. It reads like a folklorist’s taxonomy. The majority of the site’s “tropes” — which they define as “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations” — are dedicated to science fiction, fantasy and horror television. My favorite section is the Weirdness Isolation category, collecting tropes which are “based around making the world stay close to ours with the sole exception of specific strange things.” Those “strange things” are elements of the uncanny that are often brought to the surface of popular television programs.

Take, for example, the trope they term the “Weirdness Censor” — a story universe where “it seems that with your average person, their attention span is wholly taken up with the gray mundanity of their everyday lives. Literally, they [the minor characters] can’t see anything too strange” and therefore ignore the weirdness that surrounds them…while the main characters in the story are entirely focused on interacting with it. This trope is otherwise known as “Sunnydale Syndrome” — named after the setting of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where everyone is oblivous to the vampires and other evil creatures who walk around right under their noses (quite literally, the high school is located right on top of a portal to hell, the Hellmouth).

Sunnydale Syndrome is, essentially, a social allegory for what psychoanalysts term “disavowal” on a cultural scale. Like “living in denial,” disavowal is a process where the mind unconsciously refuses to acknowledge something potentially traumatizing to the ego when confronted with it in reality — the very idea is instead “inconceivable” to the mind. This is closely related to the repressive nature of the Uncanny; that is, the “return of the repressed” is at once felt emotionally and yet also disavowed as irrational or impossible.

I find such psychoanalytical approaches interesting because they expand our understanding of horror stories beyond such “reductive” notions as battles between good and evil. Thus, for example, when Buffy and her pals battle the demons of Hellspawn, we are witnessing something symbolically healthy and pragmatic in contradistinction to the culture in which the story is staged, which is treated as unhealthy in its passive, perpetual state of denial. That denial, that passivity on the cultural level, is what contributes to the social problems that the heroes of the story are symbolically grappling with.

This schema allows for some interesting play on the field of the uncanny throughout the Buffy the Vampire TV series. See, for example, Kelly Kromer’s essay, “Silence as Symptom” in Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy Studies (5.3).

iPod Shuffle ad asks consumers to "Enjoy Uncertainty"

Although the iPod shuffle is now an mp3 player that is the size of a postage stamp, the advertising campaign for the device — back in 2006 when it was the size of a stick of gum — asked consumers to “Enjoy Uncertainty.”

I can think of no better mascot for the popular uncanny.  Typically, uncertainty is associated with fear, anxiety, dread, and all things terrifying — indeterminacy is the Other to the certitude of intellectual mastery.  However, there can be pleasure in the unexpected – a “pleasant” surprise — and this is the crux of iPod’s campaign, which is selling a product that literally “shuffles” (or “randomizes”) song files in unexpected ways. 

The “random” function of listening to music is nothing new, of course.  Ever since I first saw a CD player (let alone a jukebox), I’ve seen this ability — and of course ANY item that can be indexed can also be randomized.  You can close your eyes and randomize your tunes.  Any music player can be set to randomize.  While you can “certainly” set up a play list and know exactly what you’re going to listen to on a Shuffle, it’s true that the Shuffle can pull random songs off of a hard drive and mix them up on the device so that you’ll never know what you’ll get when you listen to it.  But we experience the uncertainty of randomization and the unexpected when we listen to the radio, too, so something else is going on here. 

The marketing here attempts to package the tropes of the uncanny in both subtle and over ways that highlight the ambiguity between familiar and unfamiliar in order to HIGHLIGHT its “magical properties” as a commodity.  The iPod device itself is so alien in its flat “obelisk” design and lack of external readouts that we need to be sold on its symbolic power as much as its actual capabilities.  As a consumer object its familiar dial/wheel was still radically unfamiliar in that it appears to resemble a remote control for something inexplicably not present — a dismembered part of a missing whole — a partial limb of a larger organism (one’s computer hard drive?).  You can’t see any readouts to know what songs are coming.  You can’t know what’s coming when you press its buttons, either.  It is, in effect, a pure randomizer — like a magic wand that can conjure something unexpected-yet-ostensibly-enjoyable.  It’s almost like they’re selling the remote without the TV.  It is selling the potential of “chance,” mediated by the very act of randomization its technology enables, as something magical, so listeners can experience the uncanny surprises time and again.

From my perspective, the ‘uncanny’ elements of the packaging are most evident in the TV commercial for the Shuffle, which features the familiar “dancing silhouettes” (aways like ghosts) who dodge the threatening approach of those animated two double lines.  The music implies that these random attacks are fun, but to me it appears a little frightening as those unstoppable lines keep coming, worming their way out from the corners and borders of the frame as if virtually charging at them on their own accord. 

The uncanny TV ad for the Shuffle.

In the entire merchandising of this product, the “strange familiarity” of the iPod is reinforced by the familiarity of the graphic design.  As designer Stephen P. Anderson astutely points out in an entry on his blog, the iPod Shuffle alludes both subtly and directly to the marketing of Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum.  From the “gum stick” design of the device (whose instruction manual actually (jokingly?) warns users not to chew it!) to the way its packaging employs double arrows (employing the familiar “random” icon of interlaced arrows from iTunes) and shades of mint green to draw on our common social perceptions, the shuffle is one consumer product alluding to another famous consumer product, in the interest of being both “familiar” and yet “strange.”  The allusion is to Doublemint gum — a product whose packaging and advertising I align with the doppelganger in my book on The Popular Uncanny – simply amazes me.

What does it mean to “enjoy uncertainty”?  The pleasure of experiencing the “uncertainty” of an mp3 playlist is actually more likely an experience of unexpected recognition or synchronicity.  For one thing, the source for the songs is known so a listener will not be surprised to hear Peter Frampton “come alive” on their iPod if they own that CD.  Instead, they may have forgotten that they own Peter Framptom — that his music is lingering in one’s archive like the dead — and his music will become reanimated by the iPod.  The “a-ha” moment of hearing Frampton “come alive” again is like the logic of the return of the repressed. 

My point is that the way we interface with the media is very much analogous to the way we interface with our own memory banks.  The technology is treated as organic, anthropomorphic — and given “supernatural” agency because of it.

There are algorithms at work behind the randomizing process, but we wish they were something else, because recognizing the pattern removes the thrill and the irrational belief that underpins the random surprise.  Consider how a listener at City of Sound describes it:  ”I love the white-knuckle ride of random listening. I’m currently enjoying the odd effect …Sometimes the random effect delivers a sequence of music so perfectly thematically ‘in tune’ that the sense that iTunes just knows is quite unsettling.”

A related “a-ha” moment that City of Sound is referencing here is the anticipatory glee of hearing how songs thematically concatenate — that is, how there seems to be a “hidden logic” between the song order, where the messages seem to be ordered with a purposeful coherence, or that there is a “hidden” will in operation, spelling out a secret message.  Like, if Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do?” is followed — randomly — by a song that sounds like an answer (James Brown’s “I Feel Good”), an ironic response (Morris Albert’s “Feelings…nothing more than feelings…”) or even just another logical follow-up (”Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” by Culture Club).  It’s as if the ‘god in the machine’ is our own private DJ, mix-mastering a secret subtext. We imagine a human agency where there is only random chaos, granting the device the godlike powers we wish it had … but we know that these are really projections of our own desires and our own logic, reflected back to us when we weren’t prepared for it– an unexpected instance of the “omnipotence of thoughts.”

Is the message that we should “enjoy uncertainty” because we have no choice?  Is it a command in the imperative voice, or a plea, or simply a symptomatic response to the illnesses of our age?  Do these products assuage our fears, or pray on our insecurities?  Perhaps, after all, marketing gimmicks like these mean nothing, but Mapping the Marvelous marvels over the Shuffle in a profound way:

while the iPod shuffle slogan “Enjoy uncertainty” has prompted many ironic comments on the reliability of the device, for me it’s pure genius…I’m pretty sure that at some point, in retrospect, the iPod shuffle will be considered the icon of an age characterized by insecurity and the uncertainty of knowing.

I recently came across The Blog of the Damned — a group weblog that has compiled some interesting instances of “forteana 2.0 and the uncanny internet.”

One entry in particular really jumped out at me: The Browser as Scrying Tool — that is, the literalization of the metaphor that “the Internet is haunted, and that the clients we use, our browsers, IM softwares, IRC clients etc., might be thought of as crystal balls, or Ouija boards.”

The site refers back to Gareth Howell’s Digital Me master’s project, which includes a page about “ghosts” on the internet and comes to a poetic conclusion:

…the haunted Internet isn’t about ghosts. It’s about us. It’s us who haunt the Internet, it’s us who leave disembodied traces of a life lived. It’s us who appear out of nowhere to others in chat rooms, Google searches and online worlds. It’s us who are desperate to communicate, to understand our lives and histories, and to find peace.

I think this is quite accurate: online media becomes a projective screen upon which desires and fears — often desires and fears ABOUT new media itself — are frequently played out. (I recently purchased Jeffrey Sconce’s book, Haunted Media, which delves into the communications theory involved here, and will likely blog more about this book in depth later on). Contributing to this interest in the “afterlife” online is the fact that our online personalities can outlive us (as Lord Andrews points out in his blog entry, “The Wired and the Dead”): traces of life linger in the ether.

In the concluding chapter of my upcoming book, The Popular Uncanny, I also make the argument that structures of the uncanny underpin a great deal of what we do when we interface with cyberspace technologies. The Ouija board is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It is little wonder that you can ask a Ouija board a question online at Museum of the Talking Boards — or that you can ask questions while holding your palm over the planchette at witchboard.com — because the mouse and the visual pointer (usually an arrow on your screen — but sometimes an icon of a disembodied hand) which are virtually identical to the pointer-over-letters structure of the spiritualist board. (In fact, a very early computer game using a modified mouse was Gypsy, a Ouija styled game.) Similar analogues can be found everywhere online, including the most popular page on the internet: whenever you type a question into google, and click on the I’m Feeling Lucky button (instead of the “search” button), you might as well be asking the search engine to summon an answer to your question from the great beyond.

If surfing the web is like scrying on a Ouija board, then why doesn’t it frighten us away? The answer might be simply that we see our side of the terminal as an extension of ourselves — that the internet is not quite Other enough to instill us with dread. One of the elements of all this that make the “strangely familiar” all the more “familiar” and domestic is that so much of the web is modeled off of other media — the Ouija board was an artifact of popular culture from the late 20th century, and itself was an artifact of spiritualist culture from days of old. This transmedia repackaging of older forms of media (and literally spirit “media”) into something new makes it all the more “safe” since it is familiar, despite its connections to the traditionally occult and uncanny.

But the manufacturing of nostalgia is never quite enough to dispel the anxiety we might feel when we encounter the uncanny online: the potential for encountering an uncanny surprise still awaits behind every click of the mouse. From “pop-up” windows that spring like a Jack-in-the-Box onto our screens to the disembodied “voices” of people long gone in online mortuary guestbooks or websites left in their wake, the internet is a space that is constructed much like an uncanny haunted house, and behind every “home” page lurks the potential reminder that this virtual world is as “un-home-like” (unheimlich) as it is yet another staple of our living rooms and home offices. The windowpane is familiar; what lurks on the other side of it is always potentially frightening, weird, and strange.

Bread that Talks

Obviously, no one believes bread can talk. But Schwebel’s ‘taliano — “The Bread with the Foreign Accent” — would like us to believe its Italian bread has an identity so Italian that it can speak to us. 

I used this example in my recent lecture at the Alpha Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop for Young Writers, arguing that fictional “fantasy” is everywhere around us – and that the Uncanny is the genre of our everyday lives, lurking in messages like this that we see so often in popular culture that we’ve become immune to them. 

Part of my reason for bringing this up was to suggest that creative writers should be on the lookout for messages like these, because everyday life is ripe with concepts that can prompt ideas for fantastic tales.  Another reason I raised this matter was to discuss the differences between fantasies in advertising and fantasies in stories:  and the difference, we agreed, was that stories provide meaning to our lives, whereas consumable goods simply pretend to do more than they really can, in a quest for profit and attention. They use not only consumer fantasy, but also tropes of the literary fantastic and the uncanny to persuade us…into not only making a purchase, but also to develop a sort of brand loyalty. They accomplish this by anthropomorphizing their objects and framing them as living creatures just like us, with personality and voice.

We don’t believe it. We have, in Freud’s words, “surmounted” our infantile belief in the “omnipotence of thoughts” — the anthropomorphic and animistic fantasy that would allow something like dough to be more like man than flour and water. But we suspend disbelief anyway, because the regressive “inner child” still wants to believe and the unconscious will believe whatever it wants to in a quest to consume.

I didn’t go too far into psychoanalysis at the Alpha Writer’s Workshop. But to stimulate story ideas with the group, I asked the students: “What if bread could talk to us? What do you think it would say?”

They laughed, and started saying things like “Don’t eat me!” and “Oh no…not the toaster!” in funny accents.

Exactly. The back of the bread package features a nostalgic-looking image of an old style baker shoving a loaf into the fiery oven. Does this not take on a creepy and chilling meaning, if we are to suspend our disbelief in bread that talks in a foreign accent? My point is ludicrous, of course, but this is because the message is mixed: they seem to be saying, “our product is just like people — so let’s throw it in the oven.” How are we to make sense of such horrifying contradictions?

One answer lies in the psychology of projection. If we were to entertain the childhood fantasy that these products really are living creatures, with human abilities, then our own desire to consume logically becomes mirrored back at us: we will fear that what we want to eat might also want to eat us. Consumption is inherently aggressive. (My point is related to object-relations theory, especially Melanie Klein’s theory of the “bad breast”). Thus, we must be reminded — with images of ovens and kitchens that appeal to our adult sense of mastery and civilization — that this really is just dough we’re talking about, after all.

Even so, nothin’ says lovin’ like…dough.

[See the disturbingly brilliant "Yeast Infection" exhibition to see how various artists have explored the Doughboy's dark side!]

Heavy Metal Satan Fingers by John 'Bean' Hastings

A little known fact (to me, anyway…and it may not be a fact at all) about signs of the horns (aka “Devil’s Horns” aka “the Goat” aka “Satan Fingers”):

Though not necessarily the first to ever use [horned hand gestures] in a “rock” setting, [heavy metal singer Ronnie James] Dio was without question the one who turned it into a popular symbol. So while legions of rock fans test their metal (as it were), they are also unconsciously forming an enormous protective shield against the power of the evil eye. The next time you feel the uncomfortable gaze of a stranger and fear the wrath of the evil eye, perhaps the safest place to go is your nearest heavy metal venue.

– from “The Eyes Have It” — an interesting cultural history of the Evil Eye at the Wunderkammer at Curious Expeditions: Traveling and Exhuming the Extraordinary Past.

In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Freud describes the “source of the dread of the evil eye” as a sort of sublimated jealousy, rather than a fear of supernatural power:

Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people’s envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. A feeling like this betrays itself by a look even though it is not put into words; and when a man is prominent owing to noticeable, and particularly owing to unattractive, attributes, other people are ready to believe that his envy is rising to a more than usual degree of intensity and that this intensity will convert it into effective action. What is feared is thus a secret intention of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention has the necessary power at its commend.

By comparing a person “who possesses something…valuable and fragile,” Freud seems to level the person who glares with an evil eye to something akin to a dog snarling over its bone when anyone approaches it. Thus, I read Freud’s argument about the evil eye as not merely about the psychology of envy (see Hakim Bey’s musings on this), but a manifest sign of a power conflict, an ideologeme of the political unconscious. That is, the evil eye can be read as an ideological sign that circulates in a political economy: those with fragile (symbolic/economic) power unconsciously wield it over those without such power, out of fear that they’ll lose such power.

So where in contemporary culture do we find the archaic sign of the evil eye? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has become generalized as a cyberoptic, embodied by the camera lens of “big brother” and integrated into the panoptical gaze of a paranoiac culture. I need to think about this more fully, because the evil eye has become so domesticated, its everywhere.

But for now, is it too much to suggest that when metal fans thrash their devil horns along with the rich rock musicians on stage, this is a collective sign of class resistance? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s as patently obvious as a crowd of subjects giving a king the middle finger in a transgressive festival. But the grounding of the “mal occia” heavy metal hand sign in the uncanny folklore of the evil eye makes it a very rich metaphor to consider, in terms of popular culture.

On Sarah Langan’s “Why I Write Horror” (The Humanities Review, Spring 2008)

All genres have their intended effects. In mysteries, readers are asked to analyze. They solve puzzles. In science fiction, they imagine new, and occasionally better, worlds. But in horror, readers are asked to feel. That is why, when they put the book on the nightstand and turn out the light, they imagine that the creaking floor might actually be the ghost from the novel, bursting through the fictitious world, and into their bedrooms. They are the Gepettos of the novels they read, and in feeling, they give Pinocchio flesh. — Sarah Langan, “Why I Write Horror”

Sarah Langan’s recent article, “Why I Write Horror”, is not only a great autobiographical reflection, but also an excellent overview of the appeal and significance — if not urgency — of horror fiction today.

In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud writes:

…an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on.

Freud’s notion about the uncanny power of the symbol overtaking its referent is everywhere evident in pop culture and vox populi is doing a great job documenting our culture’s fascination with the popular uncanny on the internet. Indeed, there are so many websites that function as virtual “curiosity shoppes” online that it would be impossible to gather them all here. From the most popular weblogs (like Boing Boing) or magazines (like Wired) that seem fixated on uncanny and fantastic gadgets — and whose very names and logos imbue a sort of living energy to symbolic language — to the everyday blogs on myspace and elsewhere where people routinely post the photoshopped or animated images they find in some public gallery, or on youtube where homemade animations and films are everywhere, our human fascination with the uncanny saturates the online environment. And this makes sense, because personal computers excel at animating the inanimate and connect with the “worldwide” culture in its metaphoric web.

Along these lines, I recently found a a provocative weblog called Next Nature, which I adore. Next Nature is documenting Freud’s “uncanny effect” of the autonomous symbol on a cultural scale by calling attention to phenomena where “culture becomes nature” (and vice versa). It is not “environmentalist” in the traditional sense — its definition of “nature” is more akin to AdBusters’ emphasis on the “mental environment” or what we might term our cultural ecology. The symbols that we create and bring to life in our culture not only have an impact on our environment, they become a living part of it. As Next Nature’s authors say in their FAQ, “Old nature, in the sense of trees, plants, animals, atoms, or climate, is getting increasingly controlled and governed by man. It has turned into a cultural category. At the same time, products of culture, which we used to be in control of man, tend to outgrow us and become autonomous.” (Read Koert Van Mensvoort’s essay, “Real Nature is Not Green” — or explore his professional website — for extensions of the logic behind this).

It’s a fun and fascinating site, posting everything from articles on postmodern theory to offbeat photoshopped (or is it?) images of the strange, like that World Cow image above (which is disturbing not only because it captures the essence of the quote by Freud cited above, but also because it seems to hyperrealize the idea that we are consuming our planet). I especially enjoyed discovering their pointer to Metalosis Maligna (also on YouTube): a mockumentary about an imaginary disease that occurs not to our bodies, but to the implants and other cyborg technologies we put into our bodies, resulting in transhuman horrors. I recommend browsing through their categorical tags, which reads like a catalog of the uncanny, with keywords like antropomorphobia or toys are us. If you are interested in the academics of all this, check out their theory section, where you’ll find profundity like this idea from Eric Hoffer:

You dehumanize a man as much by returning him to nature - by making him one with rocks, vegetation, and animals - as by turning him into a machine.

Both the natural and the mechanical are the opposite of that which is uniquely human.

So often — perhaps because the idea emerged along with modernist Industrialism — we align the uncanny with the mechanical or “unnatural,” rather than the natural. The uncanny is often about the confusing loss of boundaries between the two, stunning us by calling our assumptions about what constitutes the natural and the human into question. I find Hoffer’s notion that the ‘natural’ is the antithesis of the ‘human’ a very counter-intuitive yet nonetheless extremely profound, notion.

Mensvoort and others associated with the Next Nature website have produced an image and theory-laden paperback book worth seeking out.

Parody is a good barometer for popularity.  The humor magazine, Cracked, sends up The 7 Creepiest Real-Life Robots.  Robert Brockway’s bawdy, Rated-R write ups include hilarious (yet astutely observed) rationales for “why it’s so, so creepy,” like this one for the “Actroid” robot pictured above:

The Actroid is fairly tame on the creepy scale … just as long as she remains immobile. She kind of resembles a high-end wax figurine of a big-boned Caucasian transvestite utterly failing to pass as a cute Asian girl, and that’s not so bad. Nothing we wouldn’t see on a typical business lunch with our fellow Cracked employees, anyway. It’s when she starts moving that you get both barrels of the Uncanny Shotgun…

The disturbingly fluid movements punctuated by the jarring stops, the bizarre, puppet-like posturing and a facial expression that says, “I’m a hip, young, urban professional that hungers for the lives of your babies,” creep us out exponentially.

And that’s all before she starts rapping. Yes, apparently, she raps. Because everybody knows that sudden, unexpected free-styling in casual social situations is a surefire way to set even the most anxious soul at ease.

They link to a YouTube video of Actroid to illustrate this proverbial “Uncanny shotgun.”

In following this article up with a quick web search, I found Tim Hornyak’s weblog, Loving the Machine (related to his book by the same name, which tracks Japanese robot history) which features an entry on Actroid:  “Actroid is designed to work as a receptionist or emcee…The latest emcee version, Actroid DER2, stands on a platform, generally looks gorgeous and introduces stage acts. She’s equipped with 46 servomotors and a repertoire of sassy comments, like ‘Please don’t touch me — it’s sexual harassment!’”

I suspect she would have more than that to say in response to the Cracked crew.

Actroid has her own website at Kokoro company in Japan…whose parent company is owner of the Hello Kitty! franchise.  The gallery is hilarious (”She is Robot Working Girl!” its headline reads in Austin Powers-styled lettering).  See also her Wikipedia entry.

Cracked writer Robert Brockway runs the also-bawdy, also-R rated, also hilarious ifightrobots blog.

Improv Everywhere has performed a fun uncanny experiment called “Human Mirror”: in it, a long line of identical twins sit in opposite seats in a subway car to catch commuters off guard.

Here is the video from their site (if you don’t see it, it’s also available on youtube):

The trick is fascinating, and provides a sly subtextual critique of urban alienation. The uncanny effect from such an unexpected encounter connects not only with the sudden appearance of “the double” in a context which one does not expect it, but also from the sly affirmation that it makes about our secret fears surrounding the dehumanizing capacities of urban living. Subways are machines that integrate us into their systems, while also alienating us from one another. The mirror reflection creates a sort of mise en abyme with the subway car’s line of mirror image occupants — manifesting a sense of infinite replaceability that calls our assumptions of individual identity into question. In our everyday subway cars and elevator rides, everyone else becomes a faceless and collective Other as we commute to work; here in the “Human Mirror” the Metroplis-like organizing principle shows itself, and speaks to how we participate in the dehumanization of others when we populate these machines.

Today I stumbled onto Oobject — a weird multiuser “curations collection” that exhibits photos that members spot online, organized by offbeat themes.  One of the most uncanny exhibits of them all is a collection of “medical manikins”. The above shot by Tomer Ganihar (a shot taken as part of a series he did in an Israeli hospital in which detailed mannequins of men, women and children maimed by war and terror are used to train doctors and medics) is my favorite.  This doll — head back, mouth agape, eyes askew, probed with wires and tubes — does not merely trigger an orthodox response of the “uncanny” because it is a doll that seems human, but more specifically, it looks like a dead or dying human, expressing suffering.  Indeed, it appears to either be crying out for help or having expired doing so.  The well-chosen angle of Ganihar’s shot, the pose, and so forth drive the image of helplessness home.  And the fact that it is actually an instrument used by doctors as a substitute for a living body makes it all the more disturbing, perhaps because it is as if the real world practice has “magically” caused the doll itself to suffer!

On a related note, here’s an uncanny photograph that my friend Bruce Siskawicz sent me awhile ago.  It has haunted me for some time, and I have mused over what sort of odd person would collect such dolls or have them “mooning” out the window:

On Oobject, I discovered that those creepy “things” in the window are most likely infant manikins that the Red Cross uses to teach CPR!  This knowledge does nothing to change my reaction to the image:  it looks like they are trapped inside the window, darkly askew.  The “twinning” of the dolls in a virtual shot-reverse shot symmetry only makes it more Unheimlich!

[Related link:  Here you can see a funny gag from a German TV show that uses CPR dummies in uncanny ways.]

Wade Marynowsky’s weblog, Autonomous Mutations, highlights current uncanny art projects and other manifestations of das Unheimliche and is full of fantastic and unique examples of the aesthetic (like Karakuri ningyo), links to Machine art, and also references to uncanny theory.

I say he features the “aesthetic” of the uncanny because his blog is an offshoot of his own excellent art inquiries, featured in “Autonomous Improvisation” one of several multimedia exhibits that Marynowsky has created that integrates popular music with concept art to inquire into the uncanny nature of art and computer programming. Marynowsky describes his initial project (pictured above) and artistic intentions this way:

a prepared pianola is linked to a network of computers and is programmed to orchestrate [a palette of videotaped musicians from diverse genres performing for the camera] creating an ever-changing composition. This is presented via three-channels of audio–visual projection. Through non-determinist re-composition, the work questions if it is possible for improvisation to be programmed, or if this is simply a paradoxical endeavor. More significantly, ‘Autonomous Improvisation v1′ asks us to consider what is imposed on human autonomy in an increasingly computer-controlled society.

The Autonomous Improv exhibit employs stock icons of the uncanny in random patterns (e.g. images flicker on the wall like ghosts, projecting masked singers who look like dolls, mix-mastering clowns working turntables, etc, while the old-fashioned pianola works like a player piano with candles aglow in its heart), but the real effect of the uncanny is felt when all of this “clicks” into an accidental surprise where it seems like the object is actually making music and working in some kind of uncanny harmony.

The following video from YouTube doesn’t do the sound justice, but it is a good example of the exhibit in motion. Those interested in this project should seek out Marynowsky’s DVD from his own Demux label.

In “Alien Jukebox,” a review of the exhibit for ArtSpace, (available in a a pdf file), Sean Lowry raises an interesting question about the role of the artist/author in constructing an experience of the uncanny.

Artists have long created systems or parameters in which events might unfold. Whilst the exact outcome might be unknown, a kind of outcome is expected…whenever an artist has waited for something to rust, for torn paper to fall, for mediums to react with one another, for randomly cut up audiotape to be spliced together, or for an audience to interact with a performance, repeated activities are demonstrated to produce self-similar outcomes rather than specific outcomes. Since Marynowsky has devised the program, he has also designed the kind of outcome that it will produce. But in establishing the parameters within which the work will operate, the fact that its final configuration is automated does not necessarily imply that the technology is acting “on its own accord.”

Here Lowry is arguing against Wade Marynowsky’s assertion that the work is a form of uncanny “automata” because it does not act “on its own accord,” but is rather programmed for a particular outcome to transpire. The so-called “ghost in the machine” was put there by the artist. In other words, the uncanny experience is like a firecracker: it may stun us with a burst of angst in response to its automatic semblance, but the artist has still metaphorically lit the fuse.

But all art has an artist standing in the curtains behind it in some way (even long after his or her death!), and this is not necessarily an issue. It doesn’t reduce the uncanny effect of the artwork on the spectator. Another way of thinking about what I would call the “player piano” effect: the exhibit aims at randomness that syncs up music and image in an uncanny way, but it is nevertheless programmed in much the same ways as a player piano relies upon a script to play its tune. However, in this case, the script roll has been programmed to randomize its notation and express that randomization through imagery of the uncanny that invites the observer to reflect on the random nature of the moment in juxtaposition to its orchestrated planning and programming. It is this irreconcilable conflict, perhaps, which is felt as uncanny.

It is the planned accident that anticipates uncanny synchronicity (a la Karl Jung)…perhaps this is one of the appeals of all improv.

I like how Lowry muses over Marynowsky’s work by recalling and contrasting it to the work of the surrealists, like Duchamp, who employed the uncanny but in a highly conceptual (and less experiential) way. Later in his review, he brilliantly writes that artwork like this is inherently more intimate, a symptom that the role of authorship [has shifted] toward that of artist as facilitator of experience.

Lowry considers the way technology works in relationship to this cultural shift, and muses over its implications:

The viewer now enters a relationship with a machine that extends the art action across time. Just as cinema once provided a new and strange way of experiencing life, the computer is now seemingly and endlessly extending our experience of the uncanny. “Notions of originality,” as French critic Nicolas Bourriaud put it in 2002, “…are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape”…The challenge facing emerging and hybrid art forms is the need to generate and maintain a public.

Given Marynowsky’s integration of music and programming, and his blog’s features on musical bots, I would imagine that Marynowsky would be interested in David Byrne’s ’singing robot’ project, and vice-versa.

In addition to sharing his published research online on his website, Karl F. MacDorman has a series of youtube videos from his presentation on the the “uncanny valley” in android science, given at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference , hosted by the Indiana University School of Informatics (June 6, 2007).  Below is part VII of the lecture.  Mind Hacks has a posted a good overview page of these videos if you want to watch them in order.

On Vanneman, Alan. “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone.” Bright Lights Film Journal 42 (Nov 2003).

In the “Dead or Alive?” section of his photo essay, “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone,” mystery writer/film critic Alan Vanneman gives us a veritable slide show lecture that reveals Hitchcock’s fixation with uncanny “inanimate objects that suggest life.”  To reveal Hitch’s fetishism of death, Vanneman especially is interested in the use of taxidermist art in the mise en scene: shot from below, cast in pools of shadow, or shot in extreme close-up, these inanimate bodies imply a sort of living, supernatural menace — whether to foreshadow a threat to a character (Jimmy Stewart encountering a stuffed tiger in The Man Who Knew Too Much) or to associate a character with that unnatural agency/threat (Norman Bates in Psycho, with a large stuffed bird peering down over his shoulder).

The stuffed dead bodies are evidence enough (and in Psycho they obviously all echo the role of Mother in Norman’s life).  But I particularly like this capture of Vera Miles as Lila Crane, virtually spinning in the mise en abyme of infinite reflection:

Of this shot, Vanneman writes:

Although Hitchcock used mirrors endlessly in his work, they are rarely used for overt drama. However, he achieves a phenomenal effect in Psycho when Lila Crane (Vera Miles) sees a double reflection of herself in two mirrors. Notice how the gaze of the “second Lila” (the far-right image) takes us deep into the center of the frame, where the gaze of the “third Lila” directs us back out of the frame toward the “first Lila” at the far left, who is turning around to confront who? Us? Someone behind us? Mrs. Bates?

Such fragmenting of personality is not only about us, but about the character implicitly experiencing an uncanny schizm of identity, encounter the self-as-Other — which is precisely what spectators do throughout a film, projecting their identities into character identification, while also introjecting them back into the self.  Uncanny moments like those in the shot above are moments where we recognize this process of doubling — when the world becomes a hall of mirrors and our self is palpably felt as always already being located — and dislocated — somewhere else.

Meet Julio — the singing robot.

“Voice of Julio” is an art project by David Byrne (Mr. Big Suit from the rock band, Talking Heads) and David Hanson (creator of “conversational character robots”) currently on exhibit at the “Machines and Souls” exhibition in Madrid (ends mid-Oct 2008).  Julio is made of electrons and rubber, but sings with Byrne’s voice, and his face is programmed to mimic the gestures and expressions of a vocalist.  In his project description, “Julio the Uncanny,” Byrne writes:

Knowing that singing elicits an emotional reaction from a listener and observer, I sense that encountering Julio might push some very odd buttons….We think of seeing and looking as something optical, something the eyes do. But actually seeing something, and recognizing it, is a lot more than that — it is the act of “naming” the thing the eyes are locking on to. It involves other meta brain functions that often have nothing to do with optics or the muscles controlling the eye. If seeing were just the visual and eye-muscle behavior, then isn’t that the same as what Jules does? And then isn’t singing, and displaying the attendant emotions, the same as what Julio does?

We tend to think that our emotions live inside — in our “hearts” and minds…I think it’s more complicated and more confusing than that.

Byrne discusses the uncanny effect of simulacra — the robot’s human-like appearance — but what strikes me about the premise of Byrne’s installation is the focus on song — utterance — as the actual source of indeterminacy.  I think the “strange familiarity” of hearing a voice you might dimly recognize from popular culture — Byrne’s — originating from an inorganic medium might be what accounts for the uncanny effect more than just the cognitive dissonance of perceiving a combination of the human and inhuman.  The sound of popular culture is enmeshed in the “organic” vocalizations — an echo from days gone, radio stations played, CDs danced to — nostalgia returned as future tech. Perhaps it is this temporal contradiction that enhances, if not accounts for, das Unheimliche.

On singing and the uncanny, Byrne writes:

Like many animals, humans sing for pleasure, for sex, for attention, to express pain, to relieve angst and to join and participate in a social group. All of these urges seem, if not uniquely human, at least not at all machine like. To see machines mimic these aspects of human life, is to watch some part of our imagined souls being appropriated.

You can watch a video in Byrne’s recent blog entry about the role of the soul in all of this, “Machines and Souls (Máquinas y Almas)” and then see (and hear) Julio in action to judge for yourself. 

Uncanny Media is “An International Conference on the Gothic Shadows of Mediation” being held next month on Aug 7-9, 2008 in Utrecht, Netherlands. With keynote speakers like Fred Botting (author of Gothic) and guest authors like Patrick McGrath (author of Trauma and The Grotesque), in addition to numerous academic panels, performances, and various gothic lifestyle events, this sounds like a fullblown experience more than a convention. (Wish I could attend.)

Update 07/05/08:

They have posted the conference programme, which includes abstracts to papers being delivered.