There was a particularly uncanny moment last night on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.  Wait for it:

The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien – Wax Figures, Redux

Creepy Wax Tom Cruise Stalks Wax Fonzie In The Bathroom from D-Train on Vimeo.

The wax/flesh boundaries are blurred in unexpected ways in that video that leave even Conan himself speechless about the “horrifying” result.  Wax figures may be inherently uncanny on their own, but the status of these figures as pop celebrities — on a pop celebrity show — placed in a men’s room, shifts the ground of the moment enough to render things even more unstable than they otherwise might be.

While searching for this skit online, I came across a classic Conan video featuring “The VentriloChoir in Budapest” that also was quite funny, with hilarious mockery of the human/puppet divide.  The band is great, but something about the “mass” of ventriloquists, singing in harmony, generates an unusual response — felt as uncanny, but perhaps touchingly beautiful, in its own way.  Another instance of popular folk art turning the uncanny toward alternative ends:

A public service announcement: The Addams Family is now streaming for FREE on YouTube, from MGM. A pastiche of horror fiction iconography — and also an indictment of the 50′s nuclear family, the conventions of the sitcom, and all things domestic — this show is perhaps one of the most interesting and clear-cut manifestations of the uncanny in popular culture. And it is still a riot.

"He had an excellent hand" - An Uncyclopedia Image by "Sonje"

I love dismembered hand jokes as much as anyone else, but this creepy image grabbed my attention as the featured image of the day on Uncyclopedia – a mock Wikipedia wiki that I stumbled upon when searching the web for material on the surrealist, Rene Magritte.  At first I didn’t even realize I was ON the Uncyclopedia, and as I read the parodic material on the surrealist master I thought to myself, “How clever…some cheeky monkey had fun “culture jamming” with the open source editing of the wikipedia and pulled a surrealist technique on the very surrealist himself.”  But then I figured it out and realized — they “got me.”

A site like Uncyclopedia lures the unwary google searcher into its trap.  Caught off guard, I fell into the hall of mirrors of parody — the doubling of the double — and experienced a twinge of the uncanny.  Somehow I felt on safer ground when I subsequently found the “actual” wikipedia — not on its “correct” page dedicated to Magritte, but its page on the Uncyclopedia itself.  The wikipedia’s Magritte page no longer feels stable to me…it all seems to suggest something parodic waiting to be discovered.

Everything “un-” is uncanny (“the prefix -un,” Freud tells us, “is the token of repression”). There is a degree to which my destabilizing experience of the Uncyclopedia reflects the power of das Unheimlich to redefine assumptions about boundary lines, categories, and reason itself.  Unreason, if only for a moment,  goes “all in,” and gets the upper hand.

Magritte’s own description of his work bears repeating, since there is the notion of the “hidden secret” inherent behind not only vision, but also every truth claim:

It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

Wow!  This image from the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation’s (UK) anti-second hand smoke campaign stunned me for a moment, with its visual echo of my recent post about the website, Photoshop Disasters. (Via the excellent advertising watchblog, AdGoodness).

In that original post, I wrote:  “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.”

My thinking presupposed that such freakish bodily anomalies as the giant hand image above were accidental, like Freudian slips.  Here the freak skewing is intentional and inherently artistic.  Why might it still strike one as uncanny? 

Perhaps it is the various contradictions embodied in the image:  the smoker’s fantasy (smoking makes one look younger, feel relaxed,  sophisticated, etc.) is at once contradicted by the way smoking “stunts” growth and can lead to birth defects.  And it’s not just the body anomaly that triggers these feelings and negative affect. Note the empty coat hanger dangling from the knob, right beside the smoking girl, dressed in an outfit that calls attention to itself with its bold color in a sparse white room. She herself is positioned in a mirror image of that dead white space, where another knob would be (behind her head).  Her shadow seems to be peeling away from the hanger.  The implied idea is a sort of before-and-after effect:  if the smoking continues, the narrative suggests, she will soon be “out of the picture” (reinforced by the absent mother off screen who the kid is implicitly glaring at).  The empty room with its bare wire hanger is a harbinger of death.

A powerful use of Photoshop to make a point.  See the other photographs in the campaign for full impact.  Or check out AdGoodness’ “weird” category.

A 'psychodesign' from Adbusters magazine.

Adbusters # 78 asks “What if design stood up for itself? What if instead of bowing immediately to our demands, design gently pushed back?”  In the “Psychodesign” slideshow (by Sarah Nardi), products like Panasonic Design Company‘s experimental ”Gel Remote” (above) are framed as a political use of the uncanny, animating the inanimate icons of everyday life in order to challenge and subvert the objects that enable our sense of mastery and dominance over the environment:

Inert and lifeless, design is animated only through human use. It exists only by virtue of its functionality, possessing no reality independent of its purpose in our world. Would we think of it differently if it were alive?

What products designs like these are asking us to do is empathize with objects, which in my opinion (following Susan Verducci) can be a progressive and moral outcome of an imaginative representation of the uncanny in the arts. 

But the “gel remote” got me thinking about the sensation of touch.  The gel remote — and other forms of haptic technology/art/design — are inanimate objects that “touch back”  when we touch them.  So much of the theoretical work on the uncanny has been about the visual realm and other forms of representation; haptic technology and art is a new media form that projects a sort of tactile sensation of the uncanny, which in some ways is like a “return of the gaze” in the plane of the visual. 

A little web research reveals the artistic history behind the remote and other objects of this ilk.  It stems from Kenya Hara’s attempt to assemble a group of Japanese artists to design an object from everyday life that animated tactile perception.  Japan Society cites him on the concept:

“The concept of ‘haptic,’…leads to the idea that we not only design form by creating a shape or an object, we also design how it feels. A human being is a bundle of delicate senses. Science doesn’t only help the evolution of materials and media, it also helps us understand the senses, where there may be hidden a whole new, undiscovered territory. . . ‘Haptic’ means another design attempt to expand the world atlas of senses.”

The Lighthouse art museum of Glasgow hosted this “haptic art” exhibition earlier this year, showing the Gel Remote along with a few other designs that I’d place in this category of the tactile uncanny, like Naoto Fukasawa‘s “Juice Skin”:

These examples of the repackaging of nature (a la Next Nature) are at once novel and attractive.  A review by The Scotsman of the Haptic exhibition celebrates the mission in our audio-visual centered world to reawaken the senses of touch, but laments that samples of these art objects were rubbed smooth by passers-by. 

We are both attracted to and repulsed by such objects. 

A good starting point for explaining the feelings aroused by actually touching — rather than seeing — this sort of object might be this example from Jentsch’s essay on the Uncanny, which describes the “intellectual uncertainty” one has when one can’t tell what causes a “perceived movement”:

One can read now and then in old accounts of journeys that someone sat down in an ancient forest on a tree trunk and that, to the horror of the traveler, this trunk suddenly began to move and showed itself to be a giant snake…. As long as the doubt as to the nature of the perceived movement lasts, and with it the obscurity of its cause, a feeling of terror persists in the person concerned.

The terror he describes is triggered by sitting on an object that shows itself to actually be a subject.  More than just the striking surprise of a statue that suddenly lights up with life, there is a moment of abjection on top of the terror caught up in touching what one assumed was “dead” material that surprisingly touches back with a “life” all its own.  This sensation of touch literally “pushes our buttons” perhaps more forcefully than any other form of the uncanny.  Haptic art/tech does not merely reawaken the sense of touch; it triggers a reflexive response that inherently asks us to rethink our assumptions about the environment.

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.

For Halloween, the readers of Oobject voted for their Top 12 Videos of Creepy Automata. A great theme, from cats in a milk churn to maniacally laughing dolls. One of my favorites is this clip of a Decaying 1880s Automaton Harpist by Vichy:

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.]

Heavy Metal Satan Fingers by John 'Bean' Hastings

A little known fact (to me, anyway…and it may not be a fact at all) about signs of the horns (aka “Devil’s Horns” aka “the Goat” aka “Satan Fingers”):

Though not necessarily the first to ever use [horned hand gestures] in a “rock” setting, [heavy metal singer Ronnie James] Dio was without question the one who turned it into a popular symbol. So while legions of rock fans test their metal (as it were), they are also unconsciously forming an enormous protective shield against the power of the evil eye. The next time you feel the uncomfortable gaze of a stranger and fear the wrath of the evil eye, perhaps the safest place to go is your nearest heavy metal venue.

– from “The Eyes Have It” — an interesting cultural history of the Evil Eye at the Wunderkammer at Curious Expeditions: Traveling and Exhuming the Extraordinary Past.

In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Freud describes the “source of the dread of the evil eye” as a sort of sublimated jealousy, rather than a fear of supernatural power:

Whoever possesses something that is at once valuable and fragile is afraid of other people’s envy, in so far as he projects on to them the envy he would have felt in their place. A feeling like this betrays itself by a look even though it is not put into words; and when a man is prominent owing to noticeable, and particularly owing to unattractive, attributes, other people are ready to believe that his envy is rising to a more than usual degree of intensity and that this intensity will convert it into effective action. What is feared is thus a secret intention of doing harm, and certain signs are taken to mean that that intention has the necessary power at its commend.

By comparing a person “who possesses something…valuable and fragile,” Freud seems to level the person who glares with an evil eye to something akin to a dog snarling over its bone when anyone approaches it. Thus, I read Freud’s argument about the evil eye as not merely about the psychology of envy (see Hakim Bey’s musings on this), but a manifest sign of a power conflict, an ideologeme of the political unconscious. That is, the evil eye can be read as an ideological sign that circulates in a political economy: those with fragile (symbolic/economic) power unconsciously wield it over those without such power, out of fear that they’ll lose such power.

So where in contemporary culture do we find the archaic sign of the evil eye? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it has become generalized as a cyberoptic, embodied by the camera lens of “big brother” and integrated into the panoptical gaze of a paranoiac culture. I need to think about this more fully, because the evil eye has become so domesticated, its everywhere.

But for now, is it too much to suggest that when metal fans thrash their devil horns along with the rich rock musicians on stage, this is a collective sign of class resistance? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s as patently obvious as a crowd of subjects giving a king the middle finger in a transgressive festival. But the grounding of the “mal occia” heavy metal hand sign in the uncanny folklore of the evil eye makes it a very rich metaphor to consider, in terms of popular culture.