“Archaeological Photography, the Uncanny Valley, and Lomography” by Colleen Morgan touches on the way documentary images of archaeological sites use particular photographic techniques to produce an uncanny effect (whether consciously or not).  I hadn’t heard of “lomography” before, which Morgan describes:

“lomography…employs low-quality toy cameras for an intentionally “bad” photograph that is blurry, off-color with light leaks.  These photos are more atmospheric but obviously not as accurate.  They contribute to an aesthetic of decay that compliments the subject.  HDR is too precious to me, too bejewelled and fantastic.  Lomography represents a more “accurate” view of the past in that it is hazy, hard to discern, never quite all there”

I’m reminded of horrorshow gimmicks, of course.  But looking at the images on this site got me thinking about the way that these photographs not only represent an eerie scene, but how the camera lense substitutes for the healthy eye of the viewer; our very perception is “decayed”…ergo the specter of death is felt as interior, subjective, and what the ph0tograph captures is not a haunted space, but a space which we inhabit and haunt, if only for the the momentary duration of the initial affect of uncanny.  (The HDR photographs, too, could be said to similarly introject the subjectivity of the cyborg).

Related, but different:  lomography is a nostalgia fetish for toy and archaic/outmoded cameras and film technology of the past.  Lomography.com reveals this fascination with toy cameras in all its glory.

In the digital and mobile millennium, we are seeing a shift in the ground of the uncanny, away from the home to the experience of being in the world through its representations of time and place.  Analog has become the Other.

Cremation Solutions' Urn

England’s Telegraph is running a “Best Pictures of The Year” gallery to wrap up 2009…and with images like the above from the “Weird Inventions” gallery — or even from their other bizarre and weird and spectacular galleries — one can only marvel over what a strange year it’s been…and how remarkably stranger it is going to get as we move into the second decade of the 21st century.

The photo above is a “personalized urn” that British firm Cremation Solutions can create, using 3-D facial reconstruction software. There is obviously an uncanny element to this urn, which reduces the body into ash stored into a simulacrum of one of its components — a dismembered head with a removable skullcap — in the form of an unblinking mannequin head whose features bare an alarming similarity to the dearly departed.

Curious to find out more about this product, I visited Cremation Solutions online, and after browsing some interesting “fingerprint jewelry”, quickly turned to their stunning catalog page for the personal urn. I call it “stunning” because I hadn’t expected to encounter an urn for President Obama!

Cremation Solutions' Floor Model: President Obama

At first I was taken aback by the image, both because of the accuracy of the likeness and because of the unexpected treatment of a living person, as if he were already dead. As it sunk in, I realized that most presidential figures and celebrities — indeed, anyone whose image is popular — are memorialized in a similar fashion, having their images frozen into postage stamps and plaster busts — and so, conceptually, this tribute is not so aberrant. But the uncanny is still omnipresent in the unblinking return of the gaze, the doppelganger of the dead person permanently placed on your mantle. There’s a reason why graveyards spook us: they are the spaces where the dead “live”; cremation urns can respect the role of the dead in a loving family’s home, but the more lifelike the urn, the more uncanny it becomes, making the boundaries between life and death — subject and object — very blurry. The commercial marketing of such memorials, both loved ones and celebrities, sold “on demand” (just $2600 for an urn that can hold all the ashes; $600 for a smaller keepsake), integrating the unfamiliar “magic” of high technology with the domestic familiarity of family photographs, brings this into the realm of the popular uncanny.

I could go on and on about the stock elements of the unheimlich in these urns. But one thing this particular practice brings to mind is a rising cultural trend toward employing 3D image rendering in ways that clone or replicate us. The art world seems to be responding to this with great interest. Visit the WebDesigner’s Depot on “Mind-Blowing Hyperrealistic Sculptures” or Eric Testroete’s Papercraft Self-Portrait series to muse over the implications and potentials of all this technology. I suspect we’ll see many more “personalized” objects mapped off images of ourselves or popular images in the media — there’s no end to our sense of wonder about ourselves, but one has to also wonder where natural fascination ends and cultural narcissism begins.

Eric Testroete's Papercraft Self-Portrait

[Thanks to Tim Dedopulos (@ghostwoods) for alerting us about the Telegraph photo on Twitter. (I'm @MikeArnzen on twitter, btw).]

While doing a little holiday shopping last Fall (on the occult-sounding ritual known as “Black Friday”), I spotted a bargain and caved in, buying something for myself. I purchased a gigantic external hard drive — with a Terabyte of space — to archive my files: a Maxtor OneTouch 4. Imagine my surprise when I opened the box and discovered that every item in the box came in a baggie that was sealed with a sticker that read, simply, “Save your life.”

For a moment — just a moment — I was struck with a sense of the uncanny. It felt like a message from beyond, portending doom. Or just a really ominous fortune cookie.  The syntax and rhetorical stance of the slogan didn’t help.  The surprise of being directly addressed by the unexpected stickers was felt as commanding to me; the urgency of the claim sounded more like “Run for your life!” than “Save it.”

The feeling of being caught off-guard like this, of encountering presence where one expects absence, is entirely uncanny.

Usually when I buy a product, I’ve been so saturated by packaging and advertising slogans beforehand that things like this don’t catch me off-guard.  This was more like a Jack-in-the-Box of advertising. I decided to look into this campaign a little bit.

In their brochure, Maxtor makes the pitch for their product in a language that feels like a thinly veiled death threat:

Save your life.

We are nothing more than the sum of our experiences. The pictures we take. The music we love. The work we do. This is how we are cataloging our existence. These are our lives. Everything we capture, share and create adds to us. And anything lost takes a piece of us with it.

Forever.

And forever means forever.

If that doesn’t sound like a death threat to you, try reading it again, out loud, using the voice of one of the cast members from The Sopranos, and you’ll see what I mean.

“Save your life” is a brilliant marketing slogan for a manufacturer of hard drives who wants you to buy their “peripheral” so that it becomes “central” to your computing life. Obviously, backing up your work to a storage archive is a superlative idea, especially if you are creating documents that need to establish evidence of some kind. Since buying this drive, I have come to rely on it to archive my files (including the very document I am typing right now!), so I don’t mean to suggest that the product is not a life-saver.  But in the bigger picture, one has to ask: do the trace recordings of your experience — embedded in such things as photos and audio files and to do lists — really constitute “your life”?

Of course we say things like this casually all the time.  I know several people who call their cell phones their “lives” since it contains information and data crucial to their jobs and daily routines.  A “life” — when used in a generalized context, like Maxtor’s slogan – could mean a “social” life. Or a “family” life. Or a “meaningful” life. Or a “spiritual” life.

But “Save your life”? Maxtor’s advertising campaign is a cautionary phrase; their substitution of a period for an exclamation mark at its terminus does not fool me. The company is saying that my life is at risk. The obsidian tombstone-like appearance of the product — a Kubrickean black obelisk — reminds me of the ticking clock.  My data is going to die if I don’t act fast.

The implication, of course, is that you — the consumer — can “lose” your life if you don’t back it up. This is the threat of document-centered culture. But on a psychosocial level, the implication is also that you are always already dying (or perhaps your social/family/spiritual life is on the wane) — and that, if you’re willing to pay the right price, consumer goods can save you.

Indeed, we accumulate so much anymore that it is downright scary.  We can end up  “spending” our lives saving things so obsessively.  The bloggers at A Wider Net noticed that, as part of their ad campaign, Maxtor set up displays in airports that strongly visualize how much of our files we put on our computers.  Here’s the monstrous music display that concretely represents the number of CDs you can store on a typical laptop:

We answer the threat of death — or massive loss — with the uncanny, and often respond in irrational ways. Sometimes it is made manifest in the compulsion to repeat. At other times is felt in the urgency to hold on and collect objects in a shopping spree. With our data — our proof of life in postmodern culture — we “save” it by “backing up.”  But with many of us, it goes beyond merely copying and archiving a secondary file.  It is “saving” through “mirroring” a hard drive in its entirety. And subsequently cloning your life as it appears in data.  It is the first step into obsessive “lifelogging.”

Black boxes indeed.

Natural Born Puppets

Point Click Home magazine features a fun slide show feature called “Surreal Estate”. I couldn’t help but think of Anthony Vidler’s book, The Architectural Uncanny, as I paged through the designs, real and imagined. If the “home” is where we store our secrets, their shells are the stuff of fantasy — permeable-yet-impenetrable, wondrous and scary.

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.

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.

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.

Today I stumbled onto Oobject — a weird multiuser “curations collection” that exhibits photos that members spot online, organized by offbeat themes.  One of the most uncanny exhibits of them all is a collection of “medical manikins”. The above shot by Tomer Ganihar (a shot taken as part of a series he did in an Israeli hospital in which detailed mannequins of men, women and children maimed by war and terror are used to train doctors and medics) is my favorite.  This doll — head back, mouth agape, eyes askew, probed with wires and tubes — does not merely trigger an orthodox response of the “uncanny” because it is a doll that seems human, but more specifically, it looks like a dead or dying human, expressing suffering.  Indeed, it appears to either be crying out for help or having expired doing so.  The well-chosen angle of Ganihar’s shot, the pose, and so forth drive the image of helplessness home.  And the fact that it is actually an instrument used by doctors as a substitute for a living body makes it all the more disturbing, perhaps because it is as if the real world practice has “magically” caused the doll itself to suffer!

On a related note, here’s an uncanny photograph that my friend Bruce Siskawicz sent me awhile ago.  It has haunted me for some time, and I have mused over what sort of odd person would collect such dolls or have them “mooning” out the window:

On Oobject, I discovered that those creepy “things” in the window are most likely infant manikins that the Red Cross uses to teach CPR!  This knowledge does nothing to change my reaction to the image:  it looks like they are trapped inside the window, darkly askew.  The “twinning” of the dolls in a virtual shot-reverse shot symmetry only makes it more Unheimlich!

[Related link:  Here you can see a funny gag from a German TV show that uses CPR dummies in uncanny ways.]