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.

Improv Everywhere has performed a fun uncanny experiment called “Human Mirror”: in it, a long line of identical twins sit in opposite seats in a subway car to catch commuters off guard.

Here is the video from their site (if you don’t see it, it’s also available on youtube):

The trick is fascinating, and provides a sly subtextual critique of urban alienation. The uncanny effect from such an unexpected encounter connects not only with the sudden appearance of “the double” in a context which one does not expect it, but also from the sly affirmation that it makes about our secret fears surrounding the dehumanizing capacities of urban living. Subways are machines that integrate us into their systems, while also alienating us from one another. The mirror reflection creates a sort of mise en abyme with the subway car’s line of mirror image occupants — manifesting a sense of infinite replaceability that calls our assumptions of individual identity into question. In our everyday subway cars and elevator rides, everyone else becomes a faceless and collective Other as we commute to work; here in the “Human Mirror” the Metroplis-like organizing principle shows itself, and speaks to how we participate in the dehumanization of others when we populate these machines.