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.

FACULTY WANTED TO TEACH WRITING OF POPULAR FICTION

Assistant Professor of English
Location: Greensburg, PA
Category: Faculty - Liberal Arts - English and Literature
Posted: 11/10/2008
Application Due: Open Until Filled
Type: Full Time

Seton Hill University seeks published novelist of popular fiction (preferably mystery/suspense), to teach and to mentor novel-length theses in the graduate low-residency Writing Popular Fiction program (half-load), and to teach undergraduate courses in creative writing and first-year composition.

Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in English, MFA considered. Background in journalism, publishing, and/or editing a plus. Teaching experience/potential at undergraduate level desirable.

Send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, official transcripts, a statement of philosophy of teaching, a writing sample, a teaching portfolio, and three letters of reference. The review process will begin February 15, 2009 and will continue until the position is filled.

Seton Hill University is a Catholic, liberal arts University, educating traditional and non-traditional undergraduate and graduate students. Classes are offered in a variety of formats - day, evening, and weekends. Seton Hill has a student-centered campus culture based on Catholic values, acceptance, community and service. The campus is located 35 miles east of Pittsburgh.

Postal Address: Dr. John Spurlock, Chair
Humanities Division
Seton Hill University
Seton Hill Drive
PO Box 507F
Greensburg, PA 15601
Email Address: spurlock@setonhill.edu
http://fiction.setonhill.edu
http://www.setonhill.edu

***
ALSO WANTED: COMPOSITION SPECIALIST!

Assistant Professor of Composition
Institution: Seton Hill University
Location: Greensburg, PA
Category: Faculty - Liberal Arts - English and Literature
Posted: 11/10/2008
Application Due: Open Until Filled
Type: Full Time

Seton Hill University invites applications for an Assistant Professor position in Composition, beginning fall, 2009. The faculty member will teach first-year composition courses, with a secondary teaching responsibility as a generalist in undergraduate English.

Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in Composition/Rhetoric with an M.A. in literature (or related area). Background in writing assessment and/or writing in the disciplines a plus. An outstanding candidate who has completed all but the dissertation may be considered.

Send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, official transcripts, and a statement of philosophy of teaching composition, a writing sample, a teaching portfolio, a developmental composition syllabus, a set of teaching evaluations from a composition course and three letters of reference to. The review process will begin February 15, 2009 and will continue until the position is filled.

Seton Hill University is a Catholic, liberal arts University, educating traditional and non-traditional undergraduate and graduate students. Classes are offered in a variety of formats - day, evening, and weekends. Seton Hill has a student-centered campus culture based on Catholic values, acceptance, community and service. The campus is located 35 miles east of Pittsburgh.

Postal Address: Dr. John Spurlock, Chair
Humanities Division
Seton Hill University
Seton Hill Drive
PO Box 507F
Greensburg, PA 15601
Email Address: spurlock@setonhill.edu
http://www.setonhill.edu

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.]

“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.

I particularly liked this slide below (#10), because it serves up the way that oppositional binaries structure the theory, especially in terms of the role of “secrets” in the private and the public (un-private?) spheres.

Binaries of the Uncanny

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?

Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley” theory is gaining notoriety in popular culture already, generally. Mori argued that as non-human entities (monsters, robots, androids, etc.) evolve to appear and move more and more like actual human beings, the more repulsive we find them. The “valley” refers to the negative emotional response we feel in response to an encounter with these entities, as represented in this chart (c/o Karl F. MacDorman and Takashi Minato at the journal, Android Science):

Conversations about the “uncanny valley” have been taking place in numerous communities recently, from researchers in android science to digital animators to performance artists. Artists and designers have been chatting, for example, about the differences between the success of Pixar’s Incredibles or Wall-E and the failure of shows like The Polar Express, suggesting that the latter comes too close to the valley while the former avoids it altogether. (Ward Jenkins elaborates in depth). Gamers especially are getting into the concept; fans of PS3’s upcoming game, Heavy Rain are talking about its uncanny realism, and fans of the Wii are talking about how the design of the games on that platform avoid the valley altogether. But these conversations and experiments have been on the margins of media culture for the most part… until a popular television sitcom this year employed the theory in an overt and hilarious way.

On April 24, 2008, the NBC television comedy 30 Rock aired its 13th episode of its second season, called “Succession.” The theory is actually debated overtly during the show when the two most radically off-kilter characters, variety show headliner Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) and staff writer Frank (Judah Friedlander), become obsessed with designing “Grand Theft Pornography” — the “world’s greatest pornographic video game” — and this ludicrous plot arc unfolds with wacky and surprising results as the characters become more and more obsessed with perfecting their game.

On Television Without Pity, Michael Neal summarizes the way the theory of the Uncanny Valley is delivered in the show, which employs a parody of the above chart:

Frank is attempting to explain to Tracy why his porn video game idea won’t work. It’s because of something called “the uncanny valley.” As artificial representations of humans become more and more realistic they reach a point where they stop being endearing and become creepy. Frank whips out a chart to prove his theory exists and when Tracy asks him to break it down in Star Wars he does just that: On one side of the scale are R2D2 and C3P0. “Nice,” remarks Tracy. On the other side is a real human like Han Solo. “He acts like he doesn’t care but he does,” again says Tracy stating the obvious to usual comedic perfection. But the lowest point on the scale is “a CGI storm trooper or Tom Hanks in Polar Express.” Paying careful attention I notice that only slightly above that low point is “wax figure of Nicole Kidman.”

(Neal also posts Tracy Jordan’s hilarious “notes” for the video project on his blog at slapclap.com).

What’s funny about this to me is that the theory is employed in such a serious fashion about a ludicrous and juvenile gamer fantasy. Highbrow and lowbrow elements are thereby swapped in a topsy-turvy fashion, transgressing unspoken cultural boundaries and thereby revealing them. The least intellectual characters on the show — empowered by their silly quest for porno perfection — suddenly become studious and drop their slacker routines to engage in more serious work than they ever have on the show before. Naturally, all of this juvenalia “works” so well because it ostensibly shows fans a “new” side of the characters, suggesting that they’ve really just been slacker heroes all along: given incentive, they could be geniuses who create masterpieces…it’s just that the world they live in rarely gives them “incentive” enough on their own terms.

Is 30 Rock mocking Uncanny Valley theory as a geek fetishism, or is something more at play here than just mockery that theories of the uncanny might explain? I’m not entirely sure, but when I consider the progam in terms of uncanny “doubling,” I find its clever allusions to popular culture at work here very interesting. As serious and studious as Tracy and Frank become in their creative act, there worldviews are entirely delimited by references to other forms of popular culture (Star Wars, Polar Express, etc.). One could read these “slacker heroes” as engaged in active “play”, poaching from culture high and low, manipulating its tropes to their own creative ends, breaking out of their passive role as consumers of media. They are, like dedicated fans, “scholars” of their genre, capable of theorizing and applying scholarship to their productive work. But the problem here is that they already ARE media tropes in and of themselves. Thus, everything can only be understood self-reflexively. The comedy becomes a parody not simply of intellectualism, or of game fandom, but also of itself.

Tracy: “My genius has come alive, like toys when your back is turned. I see potential for erotica in everything around me. This cup. This table. Even you Kenneth.”

Kenneth: “Well, I am wearing a cuffed trouser today.”

Kenneth’s deadpan response to Tracy’s crazy mixture of references to the uncanny is apt because it suggests that, just like any given object in the room (cup, table), a character is ultimately always a non-human object, operating as a “stand in” for real human relations that nevertheless is alive and seemingly autonomous…just like Tracy’s “genius” which “comes alive”.

The show constantly turns inward, nods at — and more often mocks — itself, before deflecting back out to the culture at large. And this episode’s treatment of the uncanny raises the status of the show as a work of popular culture itself to the foreground. The metafiction of the whole “uncanny valley” plot arc ruptures the seamless fantasy of the already metafictional sitcom, because 30 Rock is already a show about the making of a show: in the narrative proper, Tracy and Frank are an actor and a writer on a fictional TV show called “TGS” — which is already a sort of “doppelganger” in its own right, since the familiar actors from “SNL” (Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan — and Alec Baldwin, who has appeared on SNL so often he might as well have been a cast member) are playing actors/writers on the fictional set of a fictional variety show very much like SNL, which is run on the same network as SNL, and produced by the same producer as SNL. This chain of intertextuality is difficult to follow because of the parallels that it incessantly solicits, the constant cloning of cultural semes, the textual reproduction of other texts at a rate of near-panic. All of these levels of plot and intertextual references bounce off each other in an echo chamber of meaning that is not unlike a “hall of mirrors” narrative about popular narrative itself.

Thus, when “Succession” depicts these characters creating yet another fictional plot (for the game) inside of an already many-chambered plot, it becomes a metacommentary that threatens to reveal how flat their characterization really is, how constructed the storyline is from the thin tissue of other texts, and therefore shatter our suspension of disbelief. This may very well be why the creation of the video game storyline becomes like a parody of the film Amadeus Amadeus when it mocks Jordan’s lowbrow quest for a “masterpiece.” Often the show will spin plotlines more reminiscent of SNL sketches than they are of genuine charcacter conflicts, since the introduction of yet another “text-in-production” threatens to topple the metafictional coherency of the show. There are moments so hyperreal that the writers are driven to seek an intertextual touchstone elsewhere in pop culture, suggesting that the characters in THOSE shows are the flat ones, that THESE characters know better and are just acting. But it can never quite evade the control of the media. These media characters — who are media consumers themselves — are also, uncannily, autonomously, themselves creations of the consumerist media. Thus, while the “porno video game masterpiece” quest narrative is perhaps the most ludicrous and unbelievable of all the plotlines of 30 Rock, it somehow

This is the genius of the structure of 30 Rock (and perhaps why it survives while similar shows such as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip die off) — as an ongoing metafictional series, it can refer to other texts — even those from cultural theory and android science — indefinitely, while at the same time parodying itself. This is not merely self-depricating humor; the show works so well because it is itself a reflection of another text, a “looking glass world” of SNL’s variety show format — while remaining just different enough from that show to avoid any “valley” of repulsion that audiences familiar with Saturday Night Live might feel. It successfully avoids the status of Saturday Night Living Dead by being more than SNL’s other.

I’ll keep updating this post as I collect what I discover here:

Isabella van Elferen (Utrecht University)– who coordinated the Uncanny Media conference — posts her report on the conference’s website (and hints that a sequel to the event may be fomenting).

Ilse Marie Bussing (University of Edinburgh) posts her con report at The Gothic Imagination and links to entertaining (but bandwidth-soaking) event photos by LeAnne Kline.

Steen Christiansen (Aalborg University, Denmark) kindly shares his conference paper, “David Bowie’s Hauntology” on his great weblog, New Mappings.

Here’s the opening passage:

I. Introduction: Fear is Never Itself

The horror genre has many reasonable lessons to teach us, even though it is perhaps the literary genre most associated with irrationality. It is often construed around the emotional and physical responses it seeks to produce in its audience, from anxious fright to hair-raising chills, especially in the cinema, where aesthetic success is measured by the volume of spectator screams. The appeal of horror fiction and film lies in the ambivalent thrills associated with fear, suspense, and terror, no matter how significant its subtextual messages might be. Even when its practitioners mine the fields of philosophy, psychology, theology, and metaphysics in the deepest of intellectual ways, horror resists mastery by the intellect, privileges the emotional/physical response, and remains the primary venue for the literary expression of dread, anxiety, caution, shock, uncertainty, and the uncanny.

One might wonder, then, what business horror fiction has in the college classroom. If the point of horror is to scare readers, what lessons can it possibly teach them? When does fear and shock serve a pedagogical function? Is it ethical to horrify students in the hopes of teaching them something?

I delve into transformative learning theory to posit some answers to those questions. Go read “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory” if interested… college teachers might also find my weblog on pedagogy of interest.

“The unconscious is very serious today — even a little bit sad — because we repress serious things into it: sex, death, libido, desire. But if it were irony and off-handedness which were repressed, what form would the new unconscious take then? It would become ironic; we would have ironic, breezy drives and fantasies, which would surface in our dreams and our slips, in our neuroses and madness. But isn’t it already that way, in a sense?” — Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

Feelings we attach to the uncanny are often the cause of laughter as much as screams or chills. I’m wondering to what extend Baudrillard’s musing relates to the humorous side of the uncanny affect; that is, the “ironic breezy drives and fantasies” we might see expressed on popular television or in bestselling fantasy fiction. Taking his thoughts to the psychosocial level seems warranted, I think; it may be productive to substitute “political unconscious” for “the unconscious” in his quotation.

I’m musing over whether Baudrillard’s quotation, too, is the product of a philosopher searching for happiness (or whatever the antithesis of “seriousness” and “sadness” is) in the workings of the psyche. He seems to be searching for the unexpressed wish as a carefree desire (as oxymoronic as that sounds); the wandering non-aggressive stuff of the animal daydream. His final musing — “Isn’t it already that way, in a sense?” — begs the question, but he’s got me wondering to what degree the promises of advertising and the fantasies of fiction manifest this “new unconsciousness” in the way that he is framing it, and whether this might move us closer to understanding the domesticity of horror and the uncanny, the rending “familiar” of the unfamiliar, through a highly self-conscious and ironic detachment. In other words, that element of the uncanny that is not necessarily sad, serious, or scary.

Stories about dismembered hands that “act on their own accord” (Freud) are a rich symbol of the Uncanny, and movie makers have especially employed it to great — if not corny — effect. In chapter two of The Popular Uncanny, I present a cultural history of the changing function of this genre icon in horror cinema — from one of the earliest films (Vitagraph’s one-reeler, The Theiving Hand) to the present day (Flender’s stoner comedy, Idle Hands).

The ad itself is a twin:  it almost directly mimes the dancing silhouettes of those iPod TV commercials in its use of lighting, illuminating the pocket-sized product with its magical tracer lines that string back like earbud lines.  I have discussed the uncanniness of the iPod marketing previously on this blog; here the gum is imbued with a sort of magical power in that it seems to dance along with the dancer, spinning on his finger. 

But what’s more, it is also a media doppelganger:  the song is by Chris Brown, whose “urban” Doublemint jingle was commissioned by Wrigley’s with the full intention of being reproduced as part of a separately-released R&B song (called “Forever”) by Brown for his 2007 album, “Exclusive.”  The Wall Street Journal explains:

Other than the “double your pleasure” line, the lyrics to the song and the TV jingle are different. But the melody and the music behind it are nearly indistinguishable. A 60-second radio ad scheduled to air starting Friday further blurs the line between the song and the commercial. It starts with a section of “Forever,” and moves seamlessly into lyrics promoting the gum. “I’ma take you there, so don’t be scared,” Mr. Brown sings. “Double your pleasure; double your fun. It’s the right one, Doublemint gum.”

The campaign was conceived and executed by Mr. Stoute, a former senior executive at Interscope Records who counts rapper Jay-Z as a partner in his business. The idea was to connect the hit song and the jingle in listener’s minds. That way, Mr. Stoute says, “by the time the new jingle came out, it was already seeded properly within popular culture.”

Similar campaigns also took place with jingles for Juicy Fruit and Big Red. Although rap has always engaged in the art of cultural appropriation (referencing consumer goods to comment on mass culture or to appropriate the power of the dominant discourse for their own use on the margins), here the planning and deal-making that goes on behind such crass commercialism gives one pause. The literary form of “allusion” (an intertextual referencing strategy already widely practiced in the hip-hop) is not used to make an artistic statement of any kind, but is instead a prefabricated ruse, calling the integrity of the songwriting (if not the writer and the industry itself) into serious question.  At best, the stunt is redeemable as a sort of inside joke: Brown could be winking at us, suggesting that all music is commodity anyway, so what’s the difference?  Might as well make a buck, and one might excuse Brown’s selling out as yet another symbolic appropriation of the dominant culture by the marginalized. But at its worst, Brown’s jingle is the music industry’s desperate attempt at something akin to product placement in the movies: a orchestrated attempt to “plant” a cultural reference in the bald interest of breeding brand familiarity and loyalty for a commercial product.  Either way, a listener should feel cheated, I think, because it’s clear that there is advertising revenue at play here that cuts across markets which would otherwise be kept separate…unless, that is, one thinks of music as freely available as commercial TV.

I’m not writing this just to damn the campaign, but to show how tropes of the uncanny often function to wow us in order to make a spectacle out of consumerist fantasy. There’s little difference, ultimately, between Chris Brown choosing Wrigley’s Doublemint for his “dance partner” and any athlete who accepts a product endorsement on his uniform. But on a broader, cultural scale the signs become detached from their products and float freely in a quest to saturate the audience’s memory. When the boundaries between art and commerce are erased, tropes of the uncanny often become the method of erasure — and when the click of recognition hits us between the two texts we respond with a sense of deja vu that seems supernaturally predetermined. Clearly, it is not supernatural — it is, simply, a pretty savvy marketing scheme — but what it ultimately does is reify the “power” of the advertising industry as a “magic system” (as Raymond Williams theorizes it). As I show in the first chapter of The Popular Uncanny, Wrigley’s gum campaign has a long history of accomplishing this, with its doppelganger twins and its never-ending quest to get consumers to “remember this (w)rapper.”

The song hit #3 on the Billboard charts. There are direct gum references in the song and also in the music video, such as when Brown pops a stick of gum that almost “magically” launches the fantasy sequence in its opening segment. The ad at the top of this entry uncannily is resurrected in various light tricks in the video, as well, in which Brown “dances forever.” In the video, his partner is a woman; in the ad, a consumer product — are they not therefore fundamentally equated as ‘objects’ of pleasure in this intertextual way?

Take, for example, the trope they term the “Weirdness Censor” — a story universe where “it seems that with your average person, their attention span is wholly taken up with the gray mundanity of their everyday lives. Literally, they [the minor characters] can’t see anything too strange” and therefore ignore the weirdness that surrounds them…while the main characters in the story are entirely focused on interacting with it. This trope is otherwise known as “Sunnydale Syndrome” — named after the setting of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where everyone is oblivous to the vampires and other evil creatures who walk around right under their noses (quite literally, the high school is located right on top of a portal to hell, the Hellmouth).

Sunnydale Syndrome is, essentially, a social allegory for what psychoanalysts term “disavowal” on a cultural scale. Like “living in denial,” disavowal is a process where the mind unconsciously refuses to acknowledge something potentially traumatizing to the ego when confronted with it in reality — the very idea is instead “inconceivable” to the mind. This is closely related to the repressive nature of the Uncanny; that is, the “return of the repressed” is at once felt emotionally and yet also disavowed as irrational or impossible.

I find such psychoanalytical approaches interesting because they expand our understanding of horror stories beyond such “reductive” notions as battles between good and evil. Thus, for example, when Buffy and her pals battle the demons of Hellspawn, we are witnessing something symbolically healthy and pragmatic in contradistinction to the culture in which the story is staged, which is treated as unhealthy in its passive, perpetual state of denial. That denial, that passivity on the cultural level, is what contributes to the social problems that the heroes of the story are symbolically grappling with.

This schema allows for some interesting play on the field of the uncanny throughout the Buffy the Vampire TV series. See, for example, Kelly Kromer’s essay, “Silence as Symptom” in Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy Studies (5.3).

iPod Shuffle ad asks consumers to "Enjoy Uncertainty"

Although the iPod shuffle is now an mp3 player that is the size of a postage stamp, the advertising campaign for the device — back in 2006 when it was the size of a stick of gum — asked consumers to “Enjoy Uncertainty.”

I can think of no better mascot for the popular uncanny.  Typically, uncertainty is associated with fear, anxiety, dread, and all things terrifying — indeterminacy is the Other to the certitude of intellectual mastery.  However, there can be pleasure in the unexpected – a “pleasant” surprise — and this is the crux of Apple’s iPod campaign, which is selling a product that literally “shuffles” (or “randomizes”) song files in unexpected and uncanny ways. 

The “random” function of listening to music is nothing new, of course.  Ever since I first saw a CD player (let alone a jukebox), I’ve seen this ability — and of course ANY item that can be indexed can also be randomized.  You can close your eyes and randomize your tunes.  Almost any commercial music player (CD or mp3) can be set to randomize.  While you can “certainly” set up a play list and know exactly what you’re going to listen to on a Shuffle, it’s true that the Shuffle can pull random songs off of a hard drive and mix them up on the device so that you’ll never know what you’ll get when you listen to it.  But we experience the uncertainty of randomization and the unexpected when we listen to the radio, too, so something else is going on here. 

The marketing of the iPod attempts to package the tropes of the uncanny in both subtle and over ways that overdetermine the ambiguity between the familiar and unfamiliar in order to HIGHLIGHT its “magical properties” as a commodity.  The iPod device itself is so alien in its flat “obelisk” design and lack of external readouts that we need to be sold on its symbolic power as much as its actual capabilities.  As a consumer object its familiar dial/wheel is still radically unfamiliar in that it appears to resemble a remote control for something inexplicably not present — a dismembered part of a missing whole — a partial limb of a larger organism (and it is indistinguishable from the “Apple Remote” in fact).  You can’t see any readouts or windows on the device to know what songs are coming.  You can’t know what’s coming when you press its buttons, either.  It is, in effect, a pure randomizer — like a magic wand that can conjure something unexpected-yet-ostensibly-enjoyable.  It’s almost like they’re selling the remote without the TV.  Apple is selling the potential of “chance,” mediated by the very act of randomization its technology enables, as something magical, so listeners can experience the uncanny surprises time and again.

From my perspective, the ‘uncanny’ elements of the packaging are most evident in the TV commercial for the Shuffle, which features the familiar “dancing silhouettes” (aways like ghosts) who dodge the threatening approach of those animated two double lines.  The music implies that these random attacks are fun, but to me it appears a little frightening as those unstoppable lines keep coming, worming their way out from the corners and borders of the frame as if virtually charging at them on their own accord. 

The uncanny TV ad for the Shuffle.

In the entire merchandising of this product, the “strange familiarity” of the iPod is reinforced by the familiarity of the graphic design.  As designer Stephen P. Anderson astutely points out in an entry on his blog, the iPod Shuffle alludes both subtly and directly to the marketing of Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum.  From the “gum stick” design of the device (whose instruction manual actually (jokingly?) warns users not to chew it!) to the way its packaging employs double arrows (employing the familiar “random” icon of interlaced arrows from iTunes) and shades of mint green to draw on our common social perceptions, the shuffle is one consumer product alluding to another famous consumer product, in the interest of being both “familiar” and yet “strange.”  The allusion is to Doublemint gum — a product whose packaging and advertising I align with the doppelganger in my book on The Popular Uncanny – simply amazes me.

What does it mean to “enjoy uncertainty”?  The pleasure of experiencing the “uncertainty” of an mp3 playlist is actually more likely an experience of unexpected recognition or synchronicity.  For one thing, the source for the songs is known so a listener will not be surprised to hear Peter Frampton “come alive” on their iPod if they own that CD.  Instead, they may have forgotten that they own Peter Framptom — that his music is lingering in one’s archive like the dead — and his music will become reanimated by the iPod.  The “a-ha” moment of hearing Frampton “come alive” again is like the logic of the return of the repressed. 

My point is that the way we interface with the media is very much analogous to the way we interface with our own memory banks.  The technology is treated as organic, anthropomorphic — and given “supernatural” agency because of it.

There are algorithms at work behind the randomizing process, but we wish they were something else, because recognizing the pattern removes the thrill and the irrational belief that underpins the random surprise.  Consider how a listener at City of Sound describes it:  ”I love the white-knuckle ride of random listening. I’m currently enjoying the odd effect …Sometimes the random effect delivers a sequence of music so perfectly thematically ‘in tune’ that the sense that iTunes just knows is quite unsettling.”

A related “a-ha” moment that City of Sound is referencing here is the anticipatory glee of hearing how songs thematically concatenate — that is, how there seems to be a “hidden logic” between the song order, where the messages seem to be ordered with a purposeful coherence, or that there is a “hidden” will in operation, spelling out a secret message.  Like, if Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do?” is followed — randomly — by a song that sounds like an answer (James Brown’s “I Feel Good”), an ironic response (Morris Albert’s “Feelings…nothing more than feelings…”) or even just another logical follow-up (”Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” by Culture Club).  It’s as if the ‘god in the machine’ is our own private DJ, mix-mastering a secret subtext. We imagine a human agency where there is only random chaos, granting the device the godlike powers we wish it had … but we know that these are really projections of our own desires and our own logic, reflected back to us when we weren’t prepared for it– an unexpected instance of the “omnipotence of thoughts.”

Is the message that we should “enjoy uncertainty” because we have no choice?  Is it a command in the imperative voice, or a plea, or simply a symptomatic response to the illnesses of our age?  Do these products assuage our fears, or pray on our insecurities?  Perhaps, after all, marketing gimmicks like these mean nothing, but Mapping the Marvelous marvels over the Shuffle in a profound way:

while the iPod shuffle slogan “Enjoy uncertainty” has prompted many ironic comments on the reliability of the device, for me it’s pure genius…I’m pretty sure that at some point, in retrospect, the iPod shuffle will be considered the icon of an age characterized by insecurity and the uncertainty of knowing.

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.