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”

Just found this neat Prezi presentation on “Uncanny Digital Literacies” by Sian Bayne, from the ESRC seminar series on Literacy in the Digital University (University of Edinburgh, 16 Oct 2009).

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.

One of the unique concepts I broach in The Popular Uncanny is the notion of doublement — a term I employ to refer to the uncanny regress that occurs when a textual double (such as a remake or other adaptation) foregrounds the capacity for media to reproduce or “double” itself. In a recent entry on The Watchmen over at the Graphic Engine blog, new media critic Bob Rehak captures the uncanny spirit of this concept, and what is at stake in reproduction, remarkably well:

…here’s where the real uncanniness resides. We’re often hoodwinked into thinking that the visual (indeed, existential) crisis of our times is the rapidly closing gap between profilmic truth and what’s been simulated with computer graphics. But CG is merely the latest offspring of a vast heritage of manipulation, a tradition of trickery indistinguishable from cinema itself. Watchmen is uncanny not because of its visual effects, but because it comes precariously close to convincing us that we are seeing Moore’s and Gibbons’s graphic novel preserved intact, when, after all, it is only a copy — and a lossy one at that. In flashes, the film fools us into forgetting that another version exists; but then the knowledge of an original, an other, comes crashing back in to sour the experience. It is not reality and its digital double whose narrowing difference freaks us out, but the aesthetic convergence between two media, threatening to collapse into each other through the use of ever more elaborate production tools and knowing appeals to fannish competencies. At stake: the very grounds of authenticity — the epistemic rules by which we recognize our originals. — Bob Rehak, “Watchmen: Stuck in the Uncanny Valley” (3.9.09)

Brilliant. Moreover, this is not only the case with Computer Graphic enhanced cinema or graphic novels adapted to screen like the very popular Watchmen; I would argue that all remakes raise these very same stakes, because they engage in a tension with their “originals” that threatens to destabilize boundaries, which is felt by us as uncanny. In the introduction to my book, I make the case that Gus Van Sant’s version of Psycho — which is nearly identical to Hitchcock’s — is perhaps the purest form of this destabilization, by virtue of being so nearly identical that the differences between the two are psychologically overdetermined by the spectator, rendering the text “uncannily” similar-yet-different.

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”:

Russell Davies describes the invasiveness of advertising as approaching its own “uncanny valley” in a Nov 2007 post on his blog, advertising practitioner:

It seems like we’re about to enter a period where our digital lives will be full of the online equivalents of those messages you find on your television when you check into a hotel; always welcoming someone who’s got a name a bit like yours. Never actually your name. And you wish they just hadn’t bothered, you wish they’d just issued a general, warm welcome and not tried to connect at a level they just didn’t really feel (because if they’d have really felt it they’d have made sure they’d have gotten your name right.)

This online marketing revolution is going to generate quite a lot of these creepy feelings. We’re going to be wondering how companies know so much about us, why they’re talking to us in such a familiar way and how come they get everything just slightly wrong. At this point we might find ourselves responding more favourably to those brands and advertisers that can master the compelling generalisation and the universal truth. We might remember that great communicators can connect with millions by knowing only one thing about us, that we’re all people.

The loss of boundaries between private and public is often felt as an uncanny threat to the ego. Here the paranoid sense that secrets have been uncovered by monolithic, nameless marketers — lurking behind the anonymous slush of daily messaging like ghosts — is described in a progressive way. I hope advertisers listen to this truth, while remaining sensitive to the dangers of overgeneralization (or “compelling generalisation and the universal truth”). Advertisers will still be seeking the transcendent signifier, the godlike omnipotence, that lends them supernatural power and psychic presence where they otherwise have none. Advertising cannot survive without the magic system in the 21st century, even when it is “on demand.”

[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.

My essay on the teaching of horror fiction — “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory” — just went live in the debut issue of the journal, Transformative Works and Cultures.

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.

In addition to sharing his published research online on his website, Karl F. MacDorman has a series of youtube videos from his presentation on the the “uncanny valley” in android science, given at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference , hosted by the Indiana University School of Informatics (June 6, 2007).  Below is part VII of the lecture.  Mind Hacks has a posted a good overview page of these videos if you want to watch them in order.

On: “Looking For The Quintessential Scary Moment: Hughes’ Tiger, The Uncanny Valley and the Eye of Yamamura Sadako” by Adrian Bott (aka “Cavalorn”). 03/28/2004

The very first concrete thing I wanted to do with this weblog is call attention to one of my favorite weblogs — Stephanie Gray’s wonderful doctoral research project, “Exploring the Uncanny Valley”. On her home page she mentions the above livejournal article by Adrian Bott as the original source for her interest in all things Uncanny (especially zombies, clowns, and “real baby dolls”), so I read it today and wanted to post my reactions. But Gray’s livejournal and her “gallery of the uncanny valley” are must-sees and I recommend them highly for anyone reading this who is interested in Das Unheimliche in popular culture.

But on to The Ring. Bott’s conversational essay on “The Quintessential Scary Moment” is a good informal inquiry into the “mechanics of horror” that was prompted by his viewing of this classic of J-Horror cinema. Bott effectively describes what film theorists have called “the return of the gaze” when he discusses the film in detail. I particularly like how he describes the infamous climactic moment from The Ring, when the ‘ghost’ of the well steps out of the television screen to attack:

…the most frightening part…is not that Sadako emerges through the television screen. It is the moment when you suddenly know she is going to. This is literally nightmarish. Everyone is familiar with the nightmare when you suddenly know what is going to happen and you still cannot take your eyes away…..
And then, with a nerve-jangling screech on the soundtrack, the screen is filled with a clearly human-but-not-human eye, grotesquely distorted, reminiscent of a face pulled by a child. (What the rest of her face is like, we can only guess.) The effect is staggering. The faceless enigma of Sadako, which the film has steadily and subtly built up, is replaced by something horribly actual, which is looking at us. It is the one and only time that we look through the mask of hair and see Sadako clearly, and although what we see is the briefest of glimpses, it shows us all we need to know. There is nothing more quintessentially alive than an eye, and yet we know that Sadako is dead.

He goes on to describe how facial distortion generates fear, and touches up on research into what critics call “the uncanny valley” – roboticist Masahiro Mori’s assertion (back in 1970) that the closer that androids, robots, dolls, and other “nearly human” entities come to looking human, the more repulsive they become (primarily, because they appear as something like living dead corpses).

I intend to post more on the “uncanny valley” another time, particularly as it relates to prosthetic hands. (If you’re fascinated by the topic, do go to Stephanie Gray’s website for more). For now, I want to briefly note one other element that might be relevant to Bott’s ideas: the status of The Ring (Verbinski, 2002) as an American remake of a popular Japanese cultural artifact, (Ringu (Nakata, 1998)).

While I believe Bott may be discussing the original version, his point reminded me that the film gained popularity as a remake featuring Naomi Watts here in the USA, perhaps single-handedly launching the “J-Horror” craze (which, as my old friend Nicholas Rucka suggests, may be on the wane). Cinematic remakes, as I see them, always carry the potential for the uncanny by virtue of their status as “double” texts: that is, they are the “same” text, yet “different” — much like the embodied Self-as-Other of the doppelganger. Could not the “eye” that returns the gaze in the remake also be a return of the gaze of the Other — not the ghost of Sadako, but the spectatorial guilt of the violence that has been done to the original text — the repressed appropriation of another country’s popular culture — that is done in the name of profiting off the original? In other words, does the remade “eye” confront the American spectator with his own guilt over enjoying and reinforcing this cultural appropriation by Hollywood with his ticket?

These are the sort of questions I raise in my book, The Popular Uncanny (Guide Dog Books, 2009), and which I hope to expand in this weblog. I’m only getting started, but comments, feedback, discussion, and other links will always be most welcome.