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

“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.

]]> http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/new-media/lomography-and-the-uncanny/feed/ 0 http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/new-media/video-games-and-the-uncanny-valley-photorealism-vs-stylization/ http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/new-media/video-games-and-the-uncanny-valley-photorealism-vs-stylization/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:45:54 +0000 Michael Arnzen http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/?p=699 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).]

While theories of the “uncanny valley” are debatable (see Hanson’s “Upending the Uncanny Valley” (.pdf)), the quest for human-like androids and automatons continue to compel their designers. At Carnegie-Mellon University’s anthropomorphism.org, I found an interesting early study of robot head design that shows how these designers sometimes make choices about when to make robots anthropomorphic (human-like), and when to avoid such resemblance.

In “All Robots Are Not Created Equal,” by Carl F. DiSalvo (et. al, 2002), analyzes the human perception of the humanoid robot head in alarming detail, from the length between the top of the head and the browline, to the diameter of the eyeball, to the distance between pupils. The researchers want to know: how human should a robot head be, and is this contingent upon the context in which they are employed? Their study suggests that eyes, mouth, ears and nose — in that order — seem to be the most important traits for us to perceive the “humanness” in a machine. But the most interesting conclusion they draw, in my view, is that the more servile and industrial the robot, the less we want to perceive its resemblance to us. Thus, not all robots are created equal: “consumer” robots often are purposely more “robotic-looking” (mechanical) in design, since they often perform servitude and routine functions that would crush the spirit of any real human, while others — especially “fictional” — robots are often the most human-like of all, reflecting our projected fantasies for them as “characters.” Desalvo and crew propose that the following elements of robot design would create the ideal “human-like” robot:

1. wide head, wide eyes
2. features that dominate the face
3. complexity and detail in the eyes
4. four or more features
5. skin
6. humanistic form language

To what degree is our notion of the “double” located on the head, the face and its various features? Freud’s classic itinerary of uncanny traits include doll’s eyes and language, and I would suggest that the more the traits listed above appear in a doppelganger, the more uncanny that double might be. The role of the uncanny valley is at work here, and while it not directly addressed in DiSalvo’s article, it’s worth considering the degree to which the factor of increasing “likeness” in robot head design follows the x-axis of the classic uncanny valley:

Mori's 'Uncanny Valley' Schematic

It is useful to consider not only the “uncanny” in this chart, but the way that that assumptions about use value and instrumentality lie behind its structure. There is a politics of self/othering at work in this schema that is rarely discussed. One of the fundamental principles of the Uncanny as it is classically understood in aesthetics is that, symbolically, the “double” is a harbinger of death for the subject that perceives it. This is a complicated notion, but on one level what this means is that when the self perceives itself as disembodied and located in another entity — through its mirror image — we unconsciously recognize how “replaceable” we are and this is felt as uncanny. We do not only respond, typically, with fear: we also feel compelled to separate the Self from the Other as a form of protection against the threat that the Other presents. A power relationship transpires: the psyche construes a hierarchical separation that institutes the Self in a higher subject position than the Other, in order to retain its sense of mastery over identity. The Other is subjugated into a lower position. While it is “harmless” in fiction, this is also a dream that reproduces the politics of everyday life.

There is a generalized fear of robots and other forms of artificial intelligence “replacing” mankind; we see it everywhere in science fiction, but it is also a very real threat to the labor force. Robot design participates in a self/othering dynamic that domesticates these anxieties. Could the uncanny valley be a symptom of class conflict as much as some organic reaction formation? I think so.

On a lighter note, test these theories against the Life magazine photogallery, “Robots We Fear, Robots We Like”

I like the free-floating zoomieness of Bayne’s presentation, but with an ‘absent’ presenter, it is a little difficult to make the ideas and images cohere.

I found a draft of one of Bayne’s articles (in .pdf format) that might shed light on this presentation — “Uncanny spaces for higher education: teaching and learning in virtual worlds” (University of Strathclyde, 2008) — in which she explores how teaching via SecondLife and other virtual spaces can tap into a ‘pedagogy of uncertainty…as a way of working productively with the ‘strangeness’ and ‘uncanniness’ of contemporary academic – and digital – ways of being. The full article is definitely worth a read.

I think the quotation from Ronald Barnett’s book, A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty (Buckingham: Society for Research in Higher Education, 2007) is key. If I’m reading the presentation correctly, it suggests that the primary linkage between the ‘uncanny’ and pedagogy (a philosophy of teaching) is the use of new knowledge and new methods (e.g. digital technology in the classroom) to generate a defamiliarization of the habitual ways of thinking: “The student is perforce required to venture into new place, strange places, anxiety-provoking places. This is part of the point of higher education.”

DEFINITELY. This argument shares much with the thinking I’ve explored on my teaching website, Pedablogue, and particularly with an essay I wrote last year on “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Learning Theory”, published in The Jnl of Tranformative Works & Cultures last September. In that article, I discuss how horror fiction can provide an “activating event” that challenges a students assumptions…this is a little different than Bayne’s assertion that digital media taps into “intellectual uncertainty” to generate inquiry, but we sound a similar call to teachers to defamiliarize and challenge student habits, so that they might learn something new.

Of course, Freud’s theory of the uncanny is not entirely about “intellectual uncertainty”…indeed, one of his stated purposes in writing his article to begin with was to peer behind this idea — first launched in 1906 by Ernst Jentsch (“On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (.pdf)) — to explore how unconscious desire underpins an experience of the uncanny. And teaching “unconscious desire” can be a bit too slippery and mucky for the classroom. Teachers cannot be psychotherapists. Instead, teachers are in a position to raise consciousness: to help students understand how “certainty” is sometimes a ruse, and — with care — unveiling how desires that we think of as natural might actually be socially constructed, after all. And this, after all, is the impulse behind not only most teaching in the liberal arts, but most scholarship: to lift the veil.

Penguin Classics cover for The Uncanny

This is all part of my renewed interest in all things Amazon.com and ebooks. I just ordered the new, international version of the Kindle 2, and I’m very excited. Read all about it on my horror writing blog here. I am considering making this weblog — The Popular Uncanny — also available to Kindle readers….but I’m not sure, because I don’t post entries daily, like most blogs, and amazon charges a subscription fee for its many titles. Please leave a comment if you would like to see this, or whatever else you’d like to see more of on this blog.

[ Related Post: My Unheimlich LibraryThing Books ] ]]> http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/book-news/uncanny-listmania-on-amazon-com/feed/ 2 http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/theory/the-unmonkey-valley/ http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/theory/the-unmonkey-valley/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:09:15 +0000 Michael Arnzen http://www.gorelets.com/uncanny/?p=610 News note: Monkeys, according to a recent study, behave similar to humans in the face of the Uncanny Valley.

From the New Scientist: “These primates don’t participate in human culture, which suggests the uncanny valley has a biological basis,” says Karl MacDorman of Indiana University in Indianapolis. Wired magazine suggests that this means “the uncanny valley has evolutionary origins deep in the primate psyche.”

So monkeys are like humans, almost. Hmm…it all seems so…uncannily similar.

Mirrors, Doubles and Masks... Cover art for THE NEW UNCANNY designed by Sarah Eyre and David Eckersall

The book, essentially, is a literary experiment. All its contributors were challenged to read Freud’s seminal essay on “The Uncanny,” and then write a fresh fictional interpretation in order to explore what the Uncanny might mean 100 years later — today — in the 21st century, “to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps.”

The introduction by Ra Page is an excellent survey of “The Uncanny” in its own right, discussing how Freud provided a “literary template…a shopping list of shivers” that horror writers have managed to return to again and again over the past century. Page explains Freud’s essay in one of the most clear and careful ways I’ve ever seen in print. When discussing the tales in The New Uncanny, Page notes that the majority of the stories feature either the double or the doll most often, and turns to another essay on the Uncanny — Rilke’s “Dolls: On the Waxwork Dolls of Lotte Pritzel” (1913) — to discover convincing reasons why. I love the way Page concludes the introduction: “[The Uncanny] puts us on edge — that place we really should be from time to time — and reminds us: it’s us that’s alive.”

Keeping with the experimental spirit of this book, I thought I’d ask my “Psychos and the Psyche” class to review the book as a group. I have assigned each classmate a specific story in the book, and asked them to write a response (in a comment to this blog entry) that addresses the following three questions:

1) How does the author try to “update” the Freudian Uncanny in this story?
2) Does the story succeed as a work of uncanny literature?
3) What does the story teach us about the Uncanny in today’s culture?

[Warning: spoilers are inevitable! SURPRISES WILL LIKELY BE GIVEN AWAY. And all rights and opinions belong to the commenting students themselves. They will appear intermittently between now and the deadline of Oct 6th.]

Update: You can read MY review of this book (with fewer spoilers) on The Goreletter here: “A Double-Take on The New Uncanny” — MAA

You can order The New Uncanny directly from Comma Press online (be careful to note the different options for overseas orders).

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.