“Archaeological Photography, the Uncanny Valley, and Lomography” by Colleen Morgan touches on the way documentary images of archaeological sites use particular photographic techniques to produce an uncanny effect (whether consciously or not).  I hadn’t heard of “lomography” before, which Morgan describes:

“lomography…employs low-quality toy cameras for an intentionally “bad” photograph that is blurry, off-color with light leaks.  These photos are more atmospheric but obviously not as accurate.  They contribute to an aesthetic of decay that compliments the subject.  HDR is too precious to me, too bejewelled and fantastic.  Lomography represents a more “accurate” view of the past in that it is hazy, hard to discern, never quite all there”

I’m reminded of horrorshow gimmicks, of course.  But looking at the images on this site got me thinking about the way that these photographs not only represent an eerie scene, but how the camera lense substitutes for the healthy eye of the viewer; our very perception is “decayed”…ergo the specter of death is felt as interior, subjective, and what the ph0tograph captures is not a haunted space, but a space which we inhabit and haunt, if only for the the momentary duration of the initial affect of uncanny.  (The HDR photographs, too, could be said to similarly introject the subjectivity of the cyborg).

Related, but different:  lomography is a nostalgia fetish for toy and archaic/outmoded cameras and film technology of the past.  Lomography.com reveals this fascination with toy cameras in all its glory.

In the digital and mobile millennium, we are seeing a shift in the ground of the uncanny, away from the home to the experience of being in the world through its representations of time and place.  Analog has become the Other.

James Portnow and Daniel Floyd present a very articulate explanation of ‘uncanny valley’ theory for game developers in their animated lecture series for Edge-Online, “Video Games and the Uncanny Valley”. I particularly like the explanation of the pros and cons to the two strategies game designers and animators are using to approach the ‘problem’ — photorealism and stylization.

Cremation Solutions' Urn

England’s Telegraph is running a “Best Pictures of The Year” gallery to wrap up 2009…and with images like the above from the “Weird Inventions” gallery — or even from their other bizarre and weird and spectacular galleries — one can only marvel over what a strange year it’s been…and how remarkably stranger it is going to get as we move into the second decade of the 21st century.

The photo above is a “personalized urn” that British firm Cremation Solutions can create, using 3-D facial reconstruction software. There is obviously an uncanny element to this urn, which reduces the body into ash stored into a simulacrum of one of its components — a dismembered head with a removable skullcap — in the form of an unblinking mannequin head whose features bare an alarming similarity to the dearly departed.

Curious to find out more about this product, I visited Cremation Solutions online, and after browsing some interesting “fingerprint jewelry”, quickly turned to their stunning catalog page for the personal urn. I call it “stunning” because I hadn’t expected to encounter an urn for President Obama!

Cremation Solutions' Floor Model: President Obama

At first I was taken aback by the image, both because of the accuracy of the likeness and because of the unexpected treatment of a living person, as if he were already dead. As it sunk in, I realized that most presidential figures and celebrities — indeed, anyone whose image is popular — are memorialized in a similar fashion, having their images frozen into postage stamps and plaster busts — and so, conceptually, this tribute is not so aberrant. But the uncanny is still omnipresent in the unblinking return of the gaze, the doppelganger of the dead person permanently placed on your mantle. There’s a reason why graveyards spook us: they are the spaces where the dead “live”; cremation urns can respect the role of the dead in a loving family’s home, but the more lifelike the urn, the more uncanny it becomes, making the boundaries between life and death — subject and object — very blurry. The commercial marketing of such memorials, both loved ones and celebrities, sold “on demand” (just $2600 for an urn that can hold all the ashes; $600 for a smaller keepsake), integrating the unfamiliar “magic” of high technology with the domestic familiarity of family photographs, brings this into the realm of the popular uncanny.

I could go on and on about the stock elements of the unheimlich in these urns. But one thing this particular practice brings to mind is a rising cultural trend toward employing 3D image rendering in ways that clone or replicate us. The art world seems to be responding to this with great interest. Visit the WebDesigner’s Depot on “Mind-Blowing Hyperrealistic Sculptures” or Eric Testroete’s Papercraft Self-Portrait series to muse over the implications and potentials of all this technology. I suspect we’ll see many more “personalized” objects mapped off images of ourselves or popular images in the media — there’s no end to our sense of wonder about ourselves, but one has to also wonder where natural fascination ends and cultural narcissism begins.

Eric Testroete's Papercraft Self-Portrait

[Thanks to Tim Dedopulos (@ghostwoods) for alerting us about the Telegraph photo on Twitter. (I'm @MikeArnzen on twitter, btw).]

A public service announcement: The Addams Family is now streaming for FREE on YouTube, from MGM. A pastiche of horror fiction iconography — and also an indictment of the 50′s nuclear family, the conventions of the sitcom, and all things domestic — this show is perhaps one of the most interesting and clear-cut manifestations of the uncanny in popular culture. And it is still a riot.

"He had an excellent hand" - An Uncyclopedia Image by "Sonje"

I love dismembered hand jokes as much as anyone else, but this creepy image grabbed my attention as the featured image of the day on Uncyclopedia – a mock Wikipedia wiki that I stumbled upon when searching the web for material on the surrealist, Rene Magritte.  At first I didn’t even realize I was ON the Uncyclopedia, and as I read the parodic material on the surrealist master I thought to myself, “How clever…some cheeky monkey had fun “culture jamming” with the open source editing of the wikipedia and pulled a surrealist technique on the very surrealist himself.”  But then I figured it out and realized — they “got me.”

A site like Uncyclopedia lures the unwary google searcher into its trap.  Caught off guard, I fell into the hall of mirrors of parody — the doubling of the double — and experienced a twinge of the uncanny.  Somehow I felt on safer ground when I subsequently found the “actual” wikipedia — not on its “correct” page dedicated to Magritte, but its page on the Uncyclopedia itself.  The wikipedia’s Magritte page no longer feels stable to me…it all seems to suggest something parodic waiting to be discovered.

Everything “un-” is uncanny (“the prefix -un,” Freud tells us, “is the token of repression”). There is a degree to which my destabilizing experience of the Uncyclopedia reflects the power of das Unheimlich to redefine assumptions about boundary lines, categories, and reason itself.  Unreason, if only for a moment,  goes “all in,” and gets the upper hand.

Magritte’s own description of his work bears repeating, since there is the notion of the “hidden secret” inherent behind not only vision, but also every truth claim:

It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

Rob Horning‘s recent essay in PopMatters — called “Doomed to Dilettantism” — performs an alarming and fantastic excoriation of the trend toward substituting “professionalism” in the arts with “amateurism” by consumers. Ingeniously, Horning connects the proliferation of faux-artisan strip mall stores like Michael’s (the chain craft store “Where Creativity Happens”) to the consumerist propensity for instant art without work found in such manufactured-but-ultimately-empty products for purchase like Paint-by-Numbers kits and Guitar Hero. These are simulacra that pre-package the artistic process, transforming it into a consumer item, slowly depreciating the cultural value of art in the process.

Horning’s essay is important, I think, especially in the way he ties all of this in to the economy. His article is not so much a snubbing of folk art or a call for a return to the great divide between high art and lowbrow, as it is a lament about the erasure of meaningful production altogether under capitalism. He’s captured what is so pathetic about games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band — whose karaoke appeal (as I discovered over the holidays personally) is really quite fun, but whose faux instruments are irrationally consumerist and whose existence would seem unfathomable a decade ago. As Horning points out: for the same price of the kit needed for Rock Band, you can buy real musical equipment! Instead of creating art what happens is that players are trained to play along, buying more and more accessories (available in an infinite shopping mall that opens up via online access, with its downloadable songs and pricey plastic “instruments” and much, much more). While a game like Rock Band does involve players in a team and there is a joissance to be experienced that is not unlike group dance, the truth is that even the relationships between players is a faux social relationship. The players’ attentions are mediated by the TV screen which must be studied and followed like a script, rather than performing as a harmonious ensemble, riffing off the sounds created by one another. Indeed, you often have to ignore your fellow players’ mistakes if you hope to survive, and the only impromptu action you can take is lifting your guitar into the air to pretend that you’re doing a solo. Yet the pleasure of the game comes when everyone is working in uncanny synchronicity, timed with the pulsing lights — we win when become the stars on the screen by rote repetition of the programmed score, keeping the machine streaming prefab sounds in a steady and uninterrupted stream. Mechanical reproduction is the objective. It is, ultimately, the very antithesis of artistic production.

Horning argues that such an activity deifies consumption and that this sort of artistic paradigm transforms how we relate to artwork. We see it as a collectible, rather than an experience. The “aura” of the artist dissipates, replaced by the commodity fetish. We begin to value quantity over quality, in order to display and advertise our pop culture status, rather than genuinely appreciating what it is we’re collecting, or attempting to create anything of use or cultural value on our own. In the case of paint-by-numbers art, we have no time to develop the skills required to refine our talents; we have no desire to work for pleasure. In the process, the arts become a deskilled industry — just like the handcraft of furniture making is replaced by push-button factory labor — and we subsequently become bored and alienated by the arts, driven only to fill the void with more and more stuff as we throw away one thing (or momentarily give tribute to it in the collection) and move on to the next one. The result is ultimately ennui and a quest to stave it off with more consumer goods that ultimately leave us dissatisfied all over again.

In games like Rock Band and Guitar hero, we don’t create the music: the music creates us, and we recognize this in the uncanny avatars that refract back to us, screaming and pounding the skins on our TV screens.

A cheeky November 2008 webisode on TrendHunterTv.com reveals just how strange American’s fascination with such things has become in “Faux Rockstar”:

If you don’t already know, LOLcats are artfully captioned photographs of animals, as in the image above. They’re pretty funny, entirely created by the visitors to icanhascheezburger.com (whose domain name refers to one of the first LOLcat images that got widely distributed online and started this whole thing).  Like many online “sharing” sites, I consider LOLcats a fantastic form of new media folk art that attests to the popular draw of the uncanny.

How can a cute little kitten be “uncanny”?  The given framework for these captioned photos imbues the subject of the image (the cat) with a language it does not speak (a regressive, childlike “kitten” language of its own invention that gives the cat a distinctive “voice”), blurring the boundary between human and animal.  Freud calls this “the omnipotence of thoughts” in his article on “The Uncanny” — a psychological projection inherent to animistic beliefs and anthropomorphic fantasies.  Thus, it is quite normal that this unnatural and imaginary language of the LOLCAT is the equivalent of “baby speak”:  the animals are really like children more than they are like cats.  The language in the caption, moreover, matches the human-like expressions and gestures in the image so well that a spectator may be struck by the synchronicity at play, and perhaps feels the uncanny affect because reality (these are actual photos) and fantasy (the imagined/joke situation identified by the caption) become blurred, if only for a moment, springing us into laughter.  Not all the LOLcat images are about danger and death (as the one above — “nositz!”), and rarely are they “dark” or “scary” in their affect, but the humor can be intellectually unsettling because there is often a “secret” desire that the cat seems to be expressing in its caption which also reminds us of Freud’s discussion of the Uncanny as an expression of that which was to remain a secret (for him, the Repressed), suddenly returned and revealed.  Our childhood wishes (for a pet, like a doll, that can talk) seem actualized.

Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, that the group responsible for “LOLCats” would build on their popularity by hosting a similar “photoshopping” site in the form of a “doppelganger” maker: totallylookslike.com.

The pictures that users upload speak for themselves, by displaying side by side graphic associations.  Most users upload pictures of celebrities and film characters that look alike, as if they were unintentional “doubles” for one another by virture of their physical features and poses.

What makes this “uncanny” is not simply that they look like long-lost-twins, but they also provide the sort of “a-ha!” moment of recognition that Freud talks about in his essay on “Das Unheimliche” — the click of comprehending a “secret” correspondence, as if — with the image above, for instance — the unspoken inspiration behind Tim Burton’s artistic treatment of The Penguin was suddenly unveiled. 

Of course, there are also “natural” lookalikes, or body doubles in the popular imagination.  More common on totallylookslike.com are jokester post that bend the rules a bit to generate humor in ways that touch on uncanny similarities to make a point.

Here we have “New York” — a realiTV personality — matched up with Janice, a character from The Muppet Show. Yes, they both wear too much mascara and lip gloss. Is that a sufficient condition for them to be lookalikes? Or is this simply a photographic slur? 

What makes this “uncanny” is not simply the unexpected correspondence between the appearances of these TV “celebrities,” but the momentary confusion that opens up between puppet and human being when first glancing at the images side-by-side. Consciously or not, there is a degree to which the person who is making this visual pun is calling “New York” no more than a media puppet. The aggression “revealed” by the uncanny logic of this joke could betray a racist or sexist hostility, as well.  But beyond this hostility, perhaps there lurks a suggestion that this form of folk art has the ability to disempower the dominance of mass marketed artforms, such as the ”manufactured” celebrities and characters of popular TV, through uncanny expressions of mockery and parody. 

The site, at its most brilliant, can be relevatory of how forms of new media folk art perform populist expressions of resistance to (if not an outright subversion of) dominant discourses, by taking familiar images of power and status (often embodied by celebrities) and employing them in unintended ways to make a counterpoint. Above, the Vogue magazine cover is taken to task for not only suggesting something racist in its treatment of an African American basketball star as an animal (its “King Kong” reference — which is similar to the Muppet joke above), but also by lowering the ‘high fashion/high art’ status of Vogue down to the level of mere propaganda (the Army poster that originally intertextually borrowed from Kong).

Of course, the comparison attempted in the ‘totallylookslike’ image above is a bit of a stretch on behalf of the person who posted it, because they could have easily just paired the Vogue cover with an image from the King Kong film itself, which it clearly alludes to. Thus, we feel the critic, rather than the creator, at play, being highly selective, and the joke therefore doesn’t quite succeed on the level of the uncanny. Anything smacking of a critical human agency at play — a mediator — reduces the uncanny affect to a mere joke.  The person who is making the comparison cannot be present for the uncanny response to “work” — it is like spotting the zipper on the monster’s back in a horror film:  it betrays artifice and it’s “magic” is therefore disempowered.

In the above, a rock band’s album cover is equated to a familiar popular photograph that tabloid journalists famously proclaimed to be proof of an alien landscape or the “face of god” on Mars. The supernatural “face” is apparent in the accidental cast of shadow, itself an uncanny appearance.  But anyone looking at the image of Queen next to it recognizes the latter as a carefully posed and purposely abstract work of photographic art, if not also a nostalgic memory of something they may have forgotten in their record collection.  It is a clever comparison.  And it’s quite funny.  But it’s not quite uncanny. What we have, actually, is art referring to art — photos referring to other photos — and ultimately this is true of the entire site. 

What the site really shows us is consumers of popular culture trying to make sense out of the infinite stream of messages and images that circulate in the media.  That sense can only be an allusion or a visual pun – the associative logic of the dreamwork.  What is the dream of icanhascheezburger.com?  Perhaps it is about what its namesake reveals:  an inner child crying for junk food.  Only here we have the commodification of art into something resembling a cheesburger.  The dream-wish expressed by the site depends on a withdrawal from reason and a repression of our awareness that popular art is a commodity, a manufactured experience that substitues for the authentic.  By pointing out the “doppelgangers” of mass culture through visual puns and pop culture allusions, the site is like a church of the popular uncanny, its posters bearing witness to “miracles” of fantastic correspondence.

[NOTE: Those covers above go to amazon.com with an "associate" link -- this was necessary to include the widget with cover graphics. To just visit librarything, not amazon, click here!]

What you see above is not a complete bibliography by ANY means. But over the past few years, I have slowly been adding books from my collection to LibraryThing.com — a nerdy site for amateur librarians, bibliophiles, English major types and book fetishists. The site includes a widget for adding a link to books in one’s “library” elsewhere, so I am sharing it (image above) with links/covers to my books “tagged” as uncanny. It’s not complete and it still needs to be updated…but I wanted to include it here anyway.

The site is a pretty useful library for research, I think. If you click through to librarything.com, you can do a full search for all titles tagged as “uncanny” on their site, which might be helpful in research. Or you can read all the other books exhibited in my profile…it’s like snooping around on another person’s bookshelf.

Ludicine has posted a call for papers to an intermedial conference focused on horror video games (and films and books and such), entitled “Thinking After Dark.” With a focus on such topics as “figures of interactivity specific to the survival horror subgenre” and a featured guest in Barry K. Grant as a keynote speaker, this conference sounds quite promising.

“Thinking After Dark” will be held in Montreal (Quebec, Canada) from the 23rd-25th of April 2009 under the supervision of the Ludicine research group from the University of Montreal. The deadline for proposal submissions is Jan 15, 2009. I don’t know if I game enough to attend, but my curiosity is strong.

Tron

Software designer Daniel Wellman writes about an uncanny experience where a game he was programming seemed to come to life with a will all its own in his essay, “Real Life Tron on Apple IIgs”:

One day, when Marco and I were playing against two computer opponents, we forced one of the AI cycles to trap itself between its own walls and the bottom game border. Sensing an impending crash, it fired a missile, just like it always did whenever it was trapped. But this time was different – instead of firing at another trail, it fired at the game border, which looked like any other light cycle trail as far as the computer was concerned. The missile impacted with the border, leaving a cycle-sized hole, and the computer promptly took the exit and left the main playing field. Puzzled, we watched as the cycle drove through the scoring display at the bottom of the screen. It easily avoided the score digits and then drove off the screen altogether.

Shortly after, the system crashed.

Our minds reeled as we tried to understand what we had just seen. The computer had found a way to get out of the game. When a cycle left the game screen, it escaped into computer memory – just like in the movie.

(Thanks to Dennis Jerz for calling attention to this interesting essay.)

TRON is a silly movie (those outfits!), but “remaking” it across media (i.e., “transmediation”) generates the affect of the uncanny: re-imagining the “light cycles race” from the film as a computer game turns the narrative into a hyper-realized metafiction when testing it. It isn’t that the game was “just like the movie” in the way that it crashed — it is that the experience of the game is “just like” the fantastic experience of the characters in (and the spectator’s phantasy during) the film: the computer seems to have taken control of the very computer the gamer is playing with and, as artificial intelligence, has “come alive” in an autonomous way (by “going off the grid” and choosing to escape the game altogether).

We are the ghost in the machine. That’s the fantasy of Tron. And its lesson.

I enjoyed reading Wellman’s discussion of the joy of repeating this experience and making the somewhat primitive Apple IIG machine itself crash over and over again (because “protected memory” was not a part of computing yet). The compulsion to repeat the spectacular end — is this not a reenactment of the Freudian “death drive” (quite literally driven on light cycles) on the level of machines and artificial intelligence?