The Popular Uncanny

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, [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This blog will someday end, whether by choice, by ennui, by hacker attacks, or by the author’s demise.
In anticipation of its death, I begin with this first post.  A post of the living dead.
And the zombie hoard is only rising:
“Dead Blogs” (Times Daily, June 2007)
“Millions of Dead Blogs Won’t Stop Blogging” (Bloggers Blog, June 2007)
 Emphemerality [...]