Perfect Petzzz Sales Kennel

“These adorable pets offer a real pet ownership experience without the hassles and expense. Say goodbye to feedings and vet bills. Say hello to lots of love and cuddles. Perfect Petzzz – the ultimate pet.” — Perfect Petzzz website

“It is not a toy,” [VP of Marketing] Clarkson says, “but this is the closest you can get to real pet ownership without the hassles or responsibilities of owning a real pet.” — journalgazette.net

“In 2005, Perfect Petzzz® generated more than $20 million in retail sales in its first full year of operation. In fact, the Perfect Petzzz cart program was named the most successful new product concept in 2005. With the overwhelming demand for these lifelike puppies and kittens, we’ve seen other companies try to produce imitations.” — CD3 Press Release to PP Mall Dealers

Perfect Petzzz are stuffed animals that breathe.  The autonomous movement of their fur — controlled by a battery-powered engine you don’t expect to be there — is enough to trick the eye into presuming that the puppy or kitten curled up on the floor is actually a living, breathing, pet.  Cute, and perhaps attractive to your hand’s caress, until you touch it and realize it’s not real.  Then you are startled and the toy enters the already doll-crowded realm of the popular uncanny.

Of course, the Perfect Petzzz (the ”zzz’s” are for snoring)  are plastic.  And therefore the animal it represents is literally as dead as it looks, with its eyes closed and body stiffened into a disturbing fetal curl.  It should not move, but it does, and it is this representation of death-stirred-to-life — of the presumed inanimate object surprising us with its animation — that gets our reaction.  The tricky switcheroo of statuses between familiar and unfamiliar spin the roulette wheel of certainty:  the domesticated animal is rendered un-familiar (stuffed, inanimate) then restored to a heimish (cozy) status of sleeping and napping..

It is surely cute, and there is little difference between a breathing stuffed animal and a toy doll that burps or blinks.  Of course, even the cutest of dolls are inherently uncanny in the way they are semblances, pale imitations of life…but the creepy thing in this case is not so much its status as automaton, as the fact that this “sleeper” never wakes up.  These are comatose pets…and that, perhaps, is what makes them so “perfect.” Like the commodities these organic creatures have become, our domesticated pets are “perfect” when they are behaved, controlled, and easily replaceable after they expire.  Even more, these plastic pals are simulacratic forms of taxidermy (and surely a savvy taxidermist has already borrowed the motor or at least the concept for an experiment or two).  Another form of death, fantastically alive through the magic show of animism, nostalgia and fantasy.  Living, breathing, death.

Petzzz Adoption Center

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).]

Unconscious Drives - Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society

“Dreamland” is an amazing concept for an amusement park attraction based on literal interpretations of Freud’s theories.

I’m learning about this from Zoe Beloff‘s exhibition at Coney Island museum (running till July 2010): The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle, 1926-72. I’m ordering the book that covers the history of this fascinating group, and I can’t wait to spend time with it. For now, I just want to share coverage of the exhibit in an article, “The Case of Sigmund F. and Coney I.” from The New York Times, which generously includes a slide show of images from the exhibit.

Albert Grass led the Amateur Psychoanalytic group, who proposed to restore and renovate ther “Dreamland” park area as “the first amusement park ever devoted to the elucidation of dreams in accordance with the discoveries of Doctor Sigmund Freud M.D.” Grass’ sketches of the rides and attractions of the id are compelling works of art in themselves, such as the autonomous bumper cars that function as “unconscious drives — 25 cents!” (image at the top of this post is from good coverage of the exhibit at Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York blog…which also features an interview with Beloff). The textual notes (“In the unconscious nothing dies…They (the drives) are zombies!”) are at once an accurate description of Freudian thought and an unsettling literalization of anxiety and desire.

As the museum’s press release for the exhibit explains, Grass’s sketches and plans included “a working architectural model consisting of a series of pavilions (The Unconscious, Dream Works, Consciousness, The Censor), linked by a miniature locomotive (The Train of Thought)…integrat[ing the Group's]intellectual interests into its surroundings, in ways both serious and amusing.”

Grass, The Dome of the Unconscious: "Terror - In Consciousness We Experience Immediately The World Around Us"

How uncanny it would be to literally ride the unconscious and traipse along the pathways of the Dream Works. And I can only guess the horror of “The Censor” pavilion. By making the “figurative” elements of psychoanalytic theory “real,” the park attraction would have constituted an amazing fantasy adventure, but one that would resist the suspension of disbelief in that it would always already be a sort of projection of a conscious rationality in its very design. I suppose, there is a degree to which this is less an instance of the uncanny “confusion” between a symbol and what it symbolizes, and more a projection of the omnipotence of Freudian thought. Or, conversely, an artistic comment on Freudian thought as, itself, fantasy.

The Crowbot by 'Cozy Rampage'

“On a distant Ag planet, there are robotic scarecrows to mind the vast farming fields…” — From toy designer “Cozy Rampage”

The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien – Wax Figures, Redux

Creepy Wax Tom Cruise Stalks Wax Fonzie In The Bathroom from D-Train on Vimeo.

The wax/flesh boundaries are blurred in unexpected ways in that video that leave even Conan himself speechless about the “horrifying” result.  Wax figures may be inherently uncanny on their own, but the status of these figures as pop celebrities — on a pop celebrity show — placed in a men’s room, shifts the ground of the moment enough to render things even more unstable than they otherwise might be.

While searching for this skit online, I came across a classic Conan video featuring “The VentriloChoir in Budapest” that also was quite funny, with hilarious mockery of the human/puppet divide.  The band is great, but something about the “mass” of ventriloquists, singing in harmony, generates an unusual response — felt as uncanny, but perhaps touchingly beautiful, in its own way.  Another instance of popular folk art turning the uncanny toward alternative ends:

Photoshop Disasters is a funny weblog that collects flawed design elements in advertisements and elsewhere (like the above image from a Sears Catalog).

The accidental amputations, bizarre hands, and other forms of freakish anatomical blunders strike a viewer as uncanny when you spot them in what would otherwise be a “picture perfect” advertisement. We always already understand that advertising is manipulative and fake, and yet when the flaw appears, the optical illusion is shattered — the collision of consumerist fantasy against marketing reality is sometimes felt as a return of a repressed desire.

I won’t belabor how uncanny the signifiers are here, from the doll’s movement on its own accord to the way the eyes seem to cast around and occassionally return one’s gaze. The decaying apparatus is like one of Hans Bellmer’s dolls stirred into life by an electrical current. But it’s the fluid movement of the dead hands and arms that get me — human in their plucking of the strings of an absent (ghost?) harp, as the doll plays along with a creepy tune. Unheimlich!

If you go to Oobject, be careful. You might find yourself spending hours on end in their wonderful “weird” category. Or their list could inspire a day- or week-long browsing expedition in youtube for “automata.”

[See my related discussion of medical mannikins on Oobject in a previous blog entry.]