The Popular 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?

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.

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