The Popular Uncanny

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 recently came across The Blog of the Damned — a group weblog that has compiled some interesting instances of “forteana 2.0 and the uncanny internet.”

One entry in particular really jumped out at me: The Browser as Scrying Tool — that is, the literalization of the metaphor that “the Internet is haunted, 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.

In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud writes:

…an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on.

Freud’s notion about the uncanny power of the symbol overtaking its referent is everywhere evident in pop culture and vox populi is doing a great job documenting our culture’s fascination with the popular uncanny on the internet. Indeed, there are so many websites that function as virtual “curiosity shoppes” online that it would be impossible to gather them all here. From the most popular weblogs (like Boing Boing) or magazines (like Wired) that seem fixated on uncanny and fantastic gadgets — and whose very names and logos imbue a sort of living energy to symbolic language — to the everyday blogs on myspace and elsewhere where people routinely post the photoshopped or animated images they find in some public gallery, or on youtube where homemade animations and films are everywhere, our human fascination with the uncanny saturates the online environment. And this makes sense, because personal computers excel at animating the inanimate and connect with the “worldwide” culture in its metaphoric web.

Along these lines, I recently found a a provocative weblog called Next Nature, which I adore. Next Nature is documenting Freud’s “uncanny effect” of the autonomous symbol on a cultural scale by calling attention to phenomena where “culture becomes nature” (and vice versa). It is not “environmentalist” in the traditional sense — its definition of “nature” is more akin to AdBusters’ emphasis on the “mental environment” or what we might term our cultural ecology. The symbols that we create and bring to life in our culture not only have an impact on our environment, they become a living part of it. As Next Nature’s authors say in their FAQ, “Old nature, in the sense of trees, plants, animals, atoms, or climate, is getting increasingly controlled and governed by man. It has turned into a cultural category. At the same time, products of culture, which we used to be in control of man, tend to outgrow us and become autonomous.” (Read Koert Van Mensvoort’s essay, “Real Nature is Not Green” — or explore his professional website — for extensions of the logic behind this).

It’s a fun and fascinating site, posting everything from articles on postmodern theory to offbeat photoshopped (or is it?) images of the strange, like that World Cow image above (which is disturbing not only because it captures the essence of the quote by Freud cited above, but also because it seems to hyperrealize the idea that we are consuming our planet). I especially enjoyed discovering their pointer to Metalosis Maligna (also on YouTube): a mockumentary about an imaginary disease that occurs not to our bodies, but to the implants and other cyborg technologies we put into our bodies, resulting in transhuman horrors. I recommend browsing through their categorical tags, which reads like a catalog of the uncanny, with keywords like anthropomorphobia or toys are us. If you are interested in the academics of all this, check out their theory section, where you’ll find profundity like this idea from Eric Hoffer:

You dehumanize a man as much by returning him to nature - by making him one with rocks, vegetation, and animals - as by turning him into a machine.

Both the natural and the mechanical are the opposite of that which is uniquely human.

So often — perhaps because the idea emerged along with modernist Industrialism — we align the uncanny with the mechanical or “unnatural,” rather than the natural. The uncanny is often about the confusing loss of boundaries between the two, stunning us by calling our assumptions about what constitutes the natural and the human into question. I find Hoffer’s notion that the ‘natural’ is the antithesis of the ‘human’ a very counter-intuitive yet nonetheless extremely profound, notion.

Mensvoort and others associated with the Next Nature website have produced an image and theory-laden paperback book worth seeking out.

Wade Marynowsky’s weblog, Autonomous Mutations, highlights current uncanny art projects and other manifestations of das Unheimliche and is full of fantastic and unique examples of the aesthetic (like Karakuri ningyo), links to Machine art, and also references to uncanny theory.

I say he features the “aesthetic” of the uncanny because his blog is an offshoot of his own excellent art inquiries, featured in “Autonomous Improvisation” one of several multimedia exhibits that Marynowsky has created that integrates popular music with concept art to inquire into the uncanny nature of art and computer programming. Marynowsky describes his initial project (pictured above) and artistic intentions this way:

a prepared pianola is linked to a network of computers and is programmed to orchestrate [a palette of videotaped musicians from diverse genres performing for the camera] creating an ever-changing composition. This is presented via three-channels of audio–visual projection. Through non-determinist re-composition, the work questions if it is possible for improvisation to be programmed, or if this is simply a paradoxical endeavor. More significantly, ‘Autonomous Improvisation v1′ asks us to consider what is imposed on human autonomy in an increasingly computer-controlled society.

The Autonomous Improv exhibit employs stock icons of the uncanny in random patterns (e.g. images flicker on the wall like ghosts, projecting masked singers who look like dolls, mix-mastering clowns working turntables, etc, while the old-fashioned pianola works like a player piano with candles aglow in its heart), but the real effect of the uncanny is felt when all of this “clicks” into an accidental surprise where it seems like the object is actually making music and working in some kind of uncanny harmony.

The following video from YouTube doesn’t do the sound justice, but it is a good example of the exhibit in motion. Those interested in this project should seek out Marynowsky’s DVD from his own Demux label.

In “Alien Jukebox,” a review of the exhibit for ArtSpace, (available in a a pdf file), Sean Lowry raises an interesting question about the role of the artist/author in constructing an experience of the uncanny.

Artists have long created systems or parameters in which events might unfold. Whilst the exact outcome might be unknown, a kind of outcome is expected…whenever an artist has waited for something to rust, for torn paper to fall, for mediums to react with one another, for randomly cut up audiotape to be spliced together, or for an audience to interact with a performance, repeated activities are demonstrated to produce self-similar outcomes rather than specific outcomes. Since Marynowsky has devised the program, he has also designed the kind of outcome that it will produce. But in establishing the parameters within which the work will operate, the fact that its final configuration is automated does not necessarily imply that the technology is acting “on its own accord.”

Here Lowry is arguing against Wade Marynowsky’s assertion that the work is a form of uncanny “automata” because it does not act “on its own accord,” but is rather programmed for a particular outcome to transpire. The so-called “ghost in the machine” was put there by the artist. In other words, the uncanny experience is like a firecracker: it may stun us with a burst of angst in response to its automatic semblance, but the artist has still metaphorically lit the fuse.

But all art has an artist standing in the curtains behind it in some way (even long after his or her death!), and this is not necessarily an issue. It doesn’t reduce the uncanny effect of the artwork on the spectator. Another way of thinking about what I would call the “player piano” effect: the exhibit aims at randomness that syncs up music and image in an uncanny way, but it is nevertheless programmed in much the same ways as a player piano relies upon a script to play its tune. However, in this case, the script roll has been programmed to randomize its notation and express that randomization through imagery of the uncanny that invites the observer to reflect on the random nature of the moment in juxtaposition to its orchestrated planning and programming. It is this irreconcilable conflict, perhaps, which is felt as uncanny.

It is the planned accident that anticipates uncanny synchronicity (a la Karl Jung)…perhaps this is one of the appeals of all improv.

I like how Lowry muses over Marynowsky’s work by recalling and contrasting it to the work of the surrealists, like Duchamp, who employed the uncanny but in a highly conceptual (and less experiential) way. Later in his review, he brilliantly writes that artwork like this is inherently more intimate, a symptom that the role of authorship [has shifted] toward that of artist as facilitator of experience.

Lowry considers the way technology works in relationship to this cultural shift, and muses over its implications:

The viewer now enters a relationship with a machine that extends the art action across time. Just as cinema once provided a new and strange way of experiencing life, the computer is now seemingly and endlessly extending our experience of the uncanny. “Notions of originality,” as French critic Nicolas Bourriaud put it in 2002, “…are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape”…The challenge facing emerging and hybrid art forms is the need to generate and maintain a public.

Given Marynowsky’s integration of music and programming, and his blog’s features on musical bots, I would imagine that Marynowsky would be interested in David Byrne’s ’singing robot’ project, and vice-versa.

This blog will someday end, whether by choice, by ennui, by hacker attacks, or by the author’s demise.

In anticipation of its death, I begin with this first post.  A post of the living dead.

And the zombie hoard is only rising:

“Dead Blogs” (Times Daily, June 2007)

“Millions of Dead Blogs Won’t Stop Blogging” (Bloggers Blog, June 2007)

 Emphemerality of Weblogs (Caslon.com)

Unrelated but Disturbingly Upbeat Post Mortem weblog at Washington Post