The Popular Uncanny

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.]

Parody is a good barometer for popularity.  The humor magazine, Cracked, sends up The 7 Creepiest Real-Life Robots.  Robert Brockway’s bawdy, Rated-R write ups include hilarious (yet astutely observed) rationales for “why it’s so, so creepy,” like this one for the “Actroid” robot pictured above:

The Actroid is fairly tame on the creepy scale … just as long as she remains immobile. She kind of resembles a high-end wax figurine of a big-boned Caucasian transvestite utterly failing to pass as a cute Asian girl, and that’s not so bad. Nothing we wouldn’t see on a typical business lunch with our fellow Cracked employees, anyway. It’s when she starts moving that you get both barrels of the Uncanny Shotgun…

The disturbingly fluid movements punctuated by the jarring stops, the bizarre, puppet-like posturing and a facial expression that says, “I’m a hip, young, urban professional that hungers for the lives of your babies,” creep us out exponentially.

And that’s all before she starts rapping. Yes, apparently, she raps. Because everybody knows that sudden, unexpected free-styling in casual social situations is a surefire way to set even the most anxious soul at ease.

They link to a YouTube video of Actroid to illustrate this proverbial “Uncanny shotgun.”

In following this article up with a quick web search, I found Tim Hornyak’s weblog, Loving the Machine (related to his book by the same name, which tracks Japanese robot history) which features an entry on Actroid:  “Actroid is designed to work as a receptionist or emcee…The latest emcee version, Actroid DER2, stands on a platform, generally looks gorgeous and introduces stage acts. She’s equipped with 46 servomotors and a repertoire of sassy comments, like ‘Please don’t touch me — it’s sexual harassment!’”

I suspect she would have more than that to say in response to the Cracked crew.

Actroid has her own website at Kokoro company in Japan…whose parent company is owner of the Hello Kitty! franchise.  The gallery is hilarious (”She is Robot Working Girl!” its headline reads in Austin Powers-styled lettering).  See also her Wikipedia entry.

Cracked writer Robert Brockway runs the also-bawdy, also-R rated, also hilarious ifightrobots blog.

In addition to sharing his published research online on his website, Karl F. MacDorman has a series of youtube videos from his presentation on the the “uncanny valley” in android science, given at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference , hosted by the Indiana University School of Informatics (June 6, 2007).  Below is part VII of the lecture.  Mind Hacks has a posted a good overview page of these videos if you want to watch them in order.

Meet Julio — the singing robot.

“Voice of Julio” is an art project by David Byrne (Mr. Big Suit from the rock band, Talking Heads) and David Hanson (creator of “conversational character robots”) currently on exhibit at the “Machines and Souls” exhibition in Madrid (ends mid-Oct 2008).  Julio is made of electrons and rubber, but sings with Byrne’s voice, and his face is programmed to mimic the gestures and expressions of a vocalist.  In his project description, “Julio the Uncanny,” Byrne writes:

Knowing that singing elicits an emotional reaction from a listener and observer, I sense that encountering Julio might push some very odd buttons….We think of seeing and looking as something optical, something the eyes do. But actually seeing something, and recognizing it, is a lot more than that — it is the act of “naming” the thing the eyes are locking on to. It involves other meta brain functions that often have nothing to do with optics or the muscles controlling the eye. If seeing were just the visual and eye-muscle behavior, then isn’t that the same as what Jules does? And then isn’t singing, and displaying the attendant emotions, the same as what Julio does?

We tend to think that our emotions live inside — in our “hearts” and minds…I think it’s more complicated and more confusing than that.

Byrne discusses the uncanny effect of simulacra — the robot’s human-like appearance — but what strikes me about the premise of Byrne’s installation is the focus on song — utterance — as the actual source of indeterminacy.  I think the “strange familiarity” of hearing a voice you might dimly recognize from popular culture — Byrne’s — originating from an inorganic medium might be what accounts for the uncanny effect more than just the cognitive dissonance of perceiving a combination of the human and inhuman.  The sound of popular culture is enmeshed in the “organic” vocalizations — an echo from days gone, radio stations played, CDs danced to — nostalgia returned as future tech. Perhaps it is this temporal contradiction that enhances, if not accounts for, das Unheimliche.

On singing and the uncanny, Byrne writes:

Like many animals, humans sing for pleasure, for sex, for attention, to express pain, to relieve angst and to join and participate in a social group. All of these urges seem, if not uniquely human, at least not at all machine like. To see machines mimic these aspects of human life, is to watch some part of our imagined souls being appropriated.

You can watch a video in Byrne’s recent blog entry about the role of the soul in all of this, “Machines and Souls (Máquinas y Almas)” and then see (and hear) Julio in action to judge for yourself.