The Popular Uncanny

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.

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.