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The Web Browser as Ouija Board

Published by Michael Arnzen in New Media on July 24th, 2008

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.

[p.s. I'm blocking comments on this post because it is drawing much spam...]

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Bread that Talks

Published by Michael Arnzen in Advertising on July 24th, 2008
Bread that Talks

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!]

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Devil’s Horns and the Evil Eye

Published by Michael Arnzen in Theory on July 15th, 2008
Heavy Metal Satan Fingers by John 'Bean' Hastings

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.

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Giving Pinocchio Flesh

Published by Michael Arnzen in Fiction on July 15th, 2008

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.

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Next Nature

Published by Michael Arnzen in New Media on July 14th, 2008

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.

"World Cow" care of NextNature.Net

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 anthropomorphobia 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.

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Cractroids

Published by Michael Arnzen in New Media on July 10th, 2008

The Actroid - from Cracked Magazine

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.

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