The Freakiest Ads of 2011

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising on January 21st, 2012

Thank you, Tim Nudd at AdWeek, for posting the 30 Freakiest Ads of 2011. Some of them were quite disturbing (I think the anti-child abuse PSA from Ireland hit me hardest (literally). And some are freaky in the way they just push the boundaries of what is taboo. But many are prime examples of the popularization of tropes of the uncanny in a way that is so orthodox, it’s a little mind boggling. In my review of this annual top thirty list, it seems to me that the ads that take the symbolism from their slogans or product names the most literally are the ones who generate the strangest of all ads.

Note how Freudian these ads are in their symbolism. The number one pick is literally a series of dream scenarios offered up for viewer interpretation. The truth is, ALL ads are dream scenarios to begin with, so Nudd’s selectio of this one — while being the most “freakiest” — is also at the same time the most honest.

I am always interested in advertisements for chewing gum (the first chapter of The Popular Uncanny focuses on the history of gum advertising in fact), because they must go out of their way to grab our attention and “sell us” on buying something akin to food — that is, something we chew but never swallow, in a simulacra of consumption.

Here’s one from the list that is the most audaciously Freudian I’ve seen in quite awhile: a video from the “Unexpected Turn” campaign for Vivident Gum:

Another uncanny ad that struck me from the “freakiest” list is the giant ear that moves of its own accord, in ESPN’s Sports for Your Ears advertisement. An obvious example of animism, with an ambulatory body part taking on all the characteristics of a sports fan, but it’s more like a wacky dream than an advertisement. I find it telling that in the opening of the ad, the ear is shopping, and when it is at work it is a psychologist (subtly recalling (if not directly referencing) the faux radio host Frasier from TV: “I’m listening”).

Some in the list are hilarious. Some are disturbing. Some are not safe for work. Most employ the uncanny to sell a product. See them all at AdWeek.

Leave a post if you want to tell us which ones you’d put in your top two.

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Eyebombing

Published by Michael Arnzen in Oddities on December 25th, 2011

Here’s a fun form of culture jamming — a very soft and cuddly act of public defacement not unlike smiley face graffiti — that’s picking up attention online this month: “Eyebombing.”

eyebombed mailbox
“Eyebombing” is the art of sticking “googly eyes” (a.k.a. “wiggly eyes” — the glue-on sort of craft store kind) onto an inanimate object in the public sphere in a way that cleverly lends the object the appearance of a living creature.

The purpose? According to eyebombing.com, it’s “humanizing the world, one googly eye at a time.” A wee bit subversive in nature, like drawing a mustache on a billboard celebrity.  Take a snapshot of this public (de-?)facement, post it to eyebombing.com, link to it on a facebook group or flickr group or some other social network, and you have a mounting trend that — while nothing new, really — is emerging as a cute internet “meme.”  We could possibly also call this meme an instance of the popular uncanny.  But maybe not in the way you might, at first, suspect.

Sure, it’s just anthropomorphizing. Such gestures — which give the attributes of life to an inorganic object — often are “uncanny” because they confuse the assumed boundary between what makes something an object and what makes something — anything — a subject, capable of “returning the gaze.” We might feel an aura of weirdness for just the first moment we look at the object and see that it is “looking back” when it’s not supposed to. This reaction harkens back to what Freud once termed the “surmounted” childhood beliefs in an animistic world, in this case rendering everyday urban life as fantastic as the trees that talk in fairy tales or the Muppets of television childhood. Only now Oscar the Grouch doesn’t live a trashcan — he IS the trashcan. From guard rails to postal boxes, as the result of eyebombing, the objects of everyday life become doll-like with those cheap stick-on “googly” eyes so familiar to us from craft stores.

But googly eyes are plastic simulacra to begin with.  They do not “move of their own accord” per se — in fact, it would probably be far more uncanny and disturbing to see human beings with plastic eyes like these on their faces instead.  In other words, this is a representation of the gaze, a plastic staging of the uncanny, rather than a genuinely haunting act of defamiliarization.

Yet it is still — at least at first glance — a little uncanny.  Indeed, it is the eyes themselves, far more than the objects they transform, which I would say are the harbingers of the popular uncanny.  Is it not the familiarity of the googly eyes — not of the defamiliarized postal box, but the plastic eyes themselves — used in such a strange way, that makes them seem so odd, if not haunting? The googly eyes themselves are displaced from the faces of dolls and other crafts and are now potentially looking at us from anywhere, especially places where we would not expect to encounter them.  The “bombed” site — a guard rail, a trash can, a light switch — is surprisingly looking at us when we turn around, precisely like those eyes on the GEICO dollar bill stack from advertising (“I always feel like somebody’s watching me.”)

Of course, this is not really scaring anyone.  Disturbing a few, momentarily, perhaps. But we remain “surmounted” because we are not fooled by the eyes — they are not realistic the way that, say, fantastically  customized contact lenses or the eyeballs from a “reborn doll” are.  No — these “craft” items are virtually two-dimensional in all their clitter-clatter spinning disc glory, and are located more in the realm of concepts than animals.  Indeed, they seem to make a statement more than talk for themselves.  The subversive act of rendering a public, hard object as a personalized and personified object is still potent; it can defamiliarize in a very palpable manner, like all good art — but it does so in a way that is not felt as threatening.  Its unreality is domesticated — which, while seemingly lacking in the haunting power of the uncanny is nonetheless a a defining element of many items of the “popular” uncanny, which sublimates but never entirely buries repressed desire in its attempt to make the unfamiliar more familiar — often by employing the tactics of childhood fantasy. 

Eyebombing is the Fozzie-Bearification of the community property — the Jim Hensoning of the public square.  There is a return of the repressed invoked here, but it very well may a repressed belief in the power of folk art, which has been increasingly “surmounted” by technology — or even just a psychological reawakening of some relationship to a children’s puppet from days gone by — which here returns with a twinge of uncanny recognition.

Bombs away.

 

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Celebrities in The Uncanny Valley

Published by Michael Arnzen in Film, Oddities on December 2nd, 2011

Wired magazine recently posted a clever infographic: “Where Celebrities Fall in the Uncanny Valley.”

Clip from "Celebrities in the Uncanny Valley"

I don’t want to take this one too seriously, and really just wanted to share it. It’s pretty funny…and also accurate. I think it’s really just an inside-joke at the expense of the Wired editor who is included on the chart. But in the larger view, the conceit, of course, is that actors are non-human constructs — and that their plastic surgery makes Joan Rivers and Mickey Roarke akin to zombies. The chart is really flawed, however, because it mixes up the idea of a “character” and an “actor.” These are two very different things, and I believe only “actors” really constitute celebrities.

Perhaps this ambiguity is related to their uncanny affect. How often do we confuse the symbol (actor) for what it symbolizes (character)? This comes right out Freud’s essay on the Uncanny.

I have to admit, I found the names listed on the OTHER SIDE of the valley more interesting than those dumped into the valley itself. They are examples of actors who are approaching the transhuman, I suppose.

Moreover, I had to note that the use of Star*Wars figures made the Wired chart feel a little too much like the chart Tracy Jordan crafted in an episode of 30 Rock (discussed in depth here back in Oct 2008). The whole chart is an uncanny echo in a way, of both Mori’s theory and that episode of 30 Rock.

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Note to regular readers of this blog: I’ve begun a “stack” of links at delicious.com/arnzen where I will tag things I spot online relevant to The Popular Uncanny.

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The Freud Snowglobe — and others

Published by Michael Arnzen in Art+Music, Oddities on September 5th, 2011

The Sigmund Freud Snowglobe

I have to laugh whenever I see this snowglobe of Sigmund Freud, which is on a shelf in my campus office. This came to me from my old friend from graduate school, Bill Hamilton, who picked it up during a trip to Vienna last year, when he visited the Sigmund Freud Museum among other things.

What an odd choice for a kitschy ball of faux-snow! The figure inside is hard to determine as Freud, but I like to imagine it is Freud wearing ski goggles. Or a character from Futurama.

A colleague once asked me if that was cocaine swirling around his head.

The snowglobe is hilarious, as all snowglobes are.

The other day I took the above photo because the look of it got me thinking about snowglobes themselves — balls of glass that swirl powder in a watery shell to create a three-dimensional snowfall scenario. It’s impossible not to think of Citizen Kane or childhood or giftshops. To me they seem to imply a moment “frozen in time” — much like a photograph — yet not still… in persistent motion. The snowfall effect, when it works correctly, and sustains a well-balanced drift over time, aligns the device with the “automaton.” Yet we must shake them to stir them to life — these are not robots with on-off switches.

Indeed, the snowglobe is unerringly physical in nature…seemingly alive, in that it is a globular, fragile vessel that contains liquid, despite its hard glass shell. It is fascinating to watch people make this odd gesture — the shaking of a snowball — and to see the change that momentarily comes across their features — the frustration or fear or desire on their faces. Some shake them violently. Some gently disturb the glass for fear of dropping it. Some swish them like brandy; others twist them upside down and up again with violent abandon. There is something going on there, some kind of wish fulfillment and dread, in that strange moment when they grasp and disturb the contents of the globe, followed by the look of hope in their eyes as they hold it up to the light.

I always want the snow to keep moving, so I never have to shake the globe again. But gravity always wins.

The snowglobe is always reminiscent of death until it is shaken into life. In this way it has the aura of the uncanny.

It is no wonder, then, that they are objects of kitsch commodity fetishism in popular culture. Every gift shop sells them, even when the objects in the globe have absolutely nothing to do with snow, winter, or white powder in any way. Their “liveliness” promises for a price to allow you to magically bring a memory back to life, through this fetish object that stands in for the memory. We just think of them as toys, but they are deceptively more like dreams. Nay, they are more akin to crystal balls than toys.

Thinking of all this, I went hunting for interesting snowglobes online. Check out the snowglobe artwork of Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, called “Travellers”. “Like fairy tales or dreams, the tiny tableaus work as psychological metaphors,” Ken Johnson wrote for the NY Times. “Specifically, a stage everyone is bound to enter when life has lost its warmth and promise, at which point finding a new way becomes desperately urgent.” The globes contain an un-home-like moment, destabilized. And they are morbidly hilarious, too.

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Stephanie Lay’s Uncanny Valley Research Project: Call for Participants

Published by Michael Arnzen in Theory on August 8th, 2011

Stephanie Lay is researching the uncanny valley and is looking for participants to take a survey that rates the eerieness and humanness of an array of faces. The survey takes less than 20 minutes and will likely get you thinking about your own perceptions of what is and is not uncanny.

Sign up at http://bit.ly/FaceExperiment.

And be sure to peruse Stephanie’s Research Journal for her Open University Project on the Uncanny Valley online.

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Transhumanism and the Second Uncanny Valley

Published by Michael Arnzen in Theory on July 29th, 2011

The Second Uncanny Valley

The above schematic is an extension of the “uncanny valley” theory that futurist Jamais Cascio proposed in 2008: a “second uncanny valley” that occurs after culture moves into “transhuman” territory.

I like this because it causes us to rethink the structure of “uncanny valley” theory through — uncannily — its mirror reflection, or double image. As an alternate model, it’s quite clever.

The idea also seems sensible, assuming that technology can surmount the (by definition?) impossible hurdle of making a simulacra 100% identical to a healthy person and enter into radical posthumanity.

But the problem I’m having with it is the symmetricality of the model, which seems to simply split along the Y axis in the very “center” of the graph — at the “healthy person” peak.  That peak, however, should be the terminus because it is the point where the Other becomes a “mirror image” of the perceiving Self — i.e. an automaton, doll, robot or other animated object that looks (or is otherwise perceived to be) identical to a human being and therefore has surmounted the so-called “uncanny valley” (that sinking feeling in our emotional reaction to the unfamiliar).

The idea in Cascio’s theory is that once we move beyond the pinnacle of the “healthy person” we then ping backwards again, coming “down” from the pinnacle of complete identification into something radically posthuman.  If it were moving in the direction of transhuman, would it not rise ABOVE the pinnacle of health in the center of the model? Perhaps transhumanism would be something of a “sublime mountain” instead of an uncanny valley — a reaction in the perceiving subject of awe and wonder about the transcendent human.

And because the transhuman is still a version of the human, I am not so sure that transhumanity would be perceived as Other in the first place. Another way to think of this is this way:  What would a posthuman subject apprehend as uncanny?  The humanity that it has surmounted?  Or something beyond the beyond?

Indeed, the very act of perception would likely be quite different for the transhuman subject and require an altogether post-binary model.

Even so: I love encountering an alternate model that approaches this from a futurist perspective. In The Popular Uncanny, one of my arguments is that the uncanny in postmodernity is really an echo effect of modernist culture — that yesterday’s “automatons” are today’s “cyborgs” — and that the emotional affect of these things is still present, despite the familiarity of such doppelgangers in popular culture. To think of the transhuman is to think beyond the human, and to think of a post-uncanny.

Read the article and the interesting comments about it in Casio’s “Open the Future” blog.

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