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.]

If you watch the latest Doublemint gum TV commercial — featuring Chris Brown dancing in the dark with the product’s new “slim” package — you might be wondering:  gee, that song and dance is nice but what happened to the infamously kitschy jingle and the wholesome set of twins? 

The ad itself is a twin:  it almost directly mimes the dancing silhouettes of those iPod TV commercials in its use of lighting, illuminating the pocket-sized product with its magical tracer lines that string back like earbud lines.  I have discussed the uncanniness of the iPod marketing previously on this blog; here the gum is imbued with a sort of magical power in that it seems to dance along with the dancer, spinning on his finger. 

But what’s more, it is also a media doppelganger:  the song is by Chris Brown, whose “urban” Doublemint jingle was commissioned by Wrigley’s with the full intention of being reproduced as part of a separately-released R&B song (called “Forever”) by Brown for his 2007 album, “Exclusive.”  The Wall Street Journal explains:

Other than the “double your pleasure” line, the lyrics to the song and the TV jingle are different. But the melody and the music behind it are nearly indistinguishable. A 60-second radio ad scheduled to air starting Friday further blurs the line between the song and the commercial. It starts with a section of “Forever,” and moves seamlessly into lyrics promoting the gum. “I’ma take you there, so don’t be scared,” Mr. Brown sings. “Double your pleasure; double your fun. It’s the right one, Doublemint gum.”

The campaign was conceived and executed by Mr. Stoute, a former senior executive at Interscope Records who counts rapper Jay-Z as a partner in his business. The idea was to connect the hit song and the jingle in listener’s minds. That way, Mr. Stoute says, “by the time the new jingle came out, it was already seeded properly within popular culture.”

Similar campaigns also took place with jingles for Juicy Fruit and Big Red. Although rap has always engaged in the art of cultural appropriation (referencing consumer goods to comment on mass culture or to appropriate the power of the dominant discourse for their own use on the margins), here the planning and deal-making that goes on behind such crass commercialism gives one pause. The literary form of “allusion” (an intertextual referencing strategy already widely practiced in the hip-hop) is not used to make an artistic statement of any kind, but is instead a prefabricated ruse, calling the integrity of the songwriting (if not the writer and the industry itself) into serious question.  At best, the stunt is redeemable as a sort of inside joke: Brown could be winking at us, suggesting that all music is commodity anyway, so what’s the difference?  Might as well make a buck, and one might excuse Brown’s selling out as yet another symbolic appropriation of the dominant culture by the marginalized. But at its worst, Brown’s jingle is the music industry’s desperate attempt at something akin to product placement in the movies: a orchestrated attempt to “plant” a cultural reference in the bald interest of breeding brand familiarity and loyalty for a commercial product.  Either way, a listener should feel cheated, I think, because it’s clear that there is advertising revenue at play here that cuts across markets which would otherwise be kept separate…unless, that is, one thinks of music as freely available as commercial TV.

I’m not writing this just to damn the campaign, but to show how tropes of the uncanny often function to wow us in order to make a spectacle out of consumerist fantasy. There’s little difference, ultimately, between Chris Brown choosing Wrigley’s Doublemint for his “dance partner” and any athlete who accepts a product endorsement on his uniform. But on a broader, cultural scale the signs become detached from their products and float freely in a quest to saturate the audience’s memory. When the boundaries between art and commerce are erased, tropes of the uncanny often become the method of erasure — and when the click of recognition hits us between the two texts we respond with a sense of deja vu that seems supernaturally predetermined. Clearly, it is not supernatural — it is, simply, a pretty savvy marketing scheme — but what it ultimately does is reify the “power” of the advertising industry as a “magic system” (as Raymond Williams theorizes it). As I show in the first chapter of The Popular Uncanny, Wrigley’s gum campaign has a long history of accomplishing this, with its doppelganger twins and its never-ending quest to get consumers to “remember this (w)rapper.”

The song hit #3 on the Billboard charts. There are direct gum references in the song and also in the music video, such as when Brown pops a stick of gum that almost “magically” launches the fantasy sequence in its opening segment. The ad at the top of this entry uncannily is resurrected in various light tricks in the video, as well, in which Brown “dances forever.” In the video, his partner is a woman; in the ad, a consumer product — are they not therefore fundamentally equated as ‘objects’ of pleasure in this intertextual way?

iPod Shuffle ad asks consumers to "Enjoy Uncertainty"

Although the iPod shuffle is now an mp3 player that is the size of a postage stamp, the advertising campaign for the device — back in 2006 when it was the size of a stick of gum — asked consumers to “Enjoy Uncertainty.”

I can think of no better mascot for the popular uncanny.  Typically, uncertainty is associated with fear, anxiety, dread, and all things terrifying — indeterminacy is the Other to the certitude of intellectual mastery.  However, there can be pleasure in the unexpected – a “pleasant” surprise — and this is the crux of Apple’s iPod campaign, which is selling a product that literally “shuffles” (or “randomizes”) song files in unexpected and uncanny ways. 

The “random” function of listening to music is nothing new, of course.  Ever since I first saw a CD player (let alone a jukebox), I’ve seen this ability — and of course ANY item that can be indexed can also be randomized.  You can close your eyes and randomize your tunes.  Almost any commercial music player (CD or mp3) can be set to randomize.  While you can “certainly” set up a play list and know exactly what you’re going to listen to on a Shuffle, it’s true that the Shuffle can pull random songs off of a hard drive and mix them up on the device so that you’ll never know what you’ll get when you listen to it.  But we experience the uncertainty of randomization and the unexpected when we listen to the radio, too, so something else is going on here. 

The marketing of the iPod attempts to package the tropes of the uncanny in both subtle and over ways that overdetermine the ambiguity between the familiar and unfamiliar in order to HIGHLIGHT its “magical properties” as a commodity.  The iPod device itself is so alien in its flat “obelisk” design and lack of external readouts that we need to be sold on its symbolic power as much as its actual capabilities.  As a consumer object its familiar dial/wheel is still radically unfamiliar in that it appears to resemble a remote control for something inexplicably not present — a dismembered part of a missing whole — a partial limb of a larger organism (and it is indistinguishable from the “Apple Remote” in fact).  You can’t see any readouts or windows on the device to know what songs are coming.  You can’t know what’s coming when you press its buttons, either.  It is, in effect, a pure randomizer — like a magic wand that can conjure something unexpected-yet-ostensibly-enjoyable.  It’s almost like they’re selling the remote without the TV.  Apple is selling the potential of “chance,” mediated by the very act of randomization its technology enables, as something magical, so listeners can experience the uncanny surprises time and again.

From my perspective, the ‘uncanny’ elements of the packaging are most evident in the TV commercial for the Shuffle, which features the familiar “dancing silhouettes” (aways like ghosts) who dodge the threatening approach of those animated two double lines.  The music implies that these random attacks are fun, but to me it appears a little frightening as those unstoppable lines keep coming, worming their way out from the corners and borders of the frame as if virtually charging at them on their own accord. 

The uncanny TV ad for the Shuffle.

In the entire merchandising of this product, the “strange familiarity” of the iPod is reinforced by the familiarity of the graphic design.  As designer Stephen P. Anderson astutely points out in an entry on his blog, the iPod Shuffle alludes both subtly and directly to the marketing of Wrigley’s Doublemint Gum.  From the “gum stick” design of the device (whose instruction manual actually (jokingly?) warns users not to chew it!) to the way its packaging employs double arrows (employing the familiar “random” icon of interlaced arrows from iTunes) and shades of mint green to draw on our common social perceptions, the shuffle is one consumer product alluding to another famous consumer product, in the interest of being both “familiar” and yet “strange.”  The allusion is to Doublemint gum — a product whose packaging and advertising I align with the doppelganger in my book on The Popular Uncanny – simply amazes me.

What does it mean to “enjoy uncertainty”?  The pleasure of experiencing the “uncertainty” of an mp3 playlist is actually more likely an experience of unexpected recognition or synchronicity.  For one thing, the source for the songs is known so a listener will not be surprised to hear Peter Frampton “come alive” on their iPod if they own that CD.  Instead, they may have forgotten that they own Peter Framptom — that his music is lingering in one’s archive like the dead — and his music will become reanimated by the iPod.  The “a-ha” moment of hearing Frampton “come alive” again is like the logic of the return of the repressed. 

My point is that the way we interface with the media is very much analogous to the way we interface with our own memory banks.  The technology is treated as organic, anthropomorphic — and given “supernatural” agency because of it.

There are algorithms at work behind the randomizing process, but we wish they were something else, because recognizing the pattern removes the thrill and the irrational belief that underpins the random surprise.  Consider how a listener at City of Sound describes it:  ”I love the white-knuckle ride of random listening. I’m currently enjoying the odd effect …Sometimes the random effect delivers a sequence of music so perfectly thematically ‘in tune’ that the sense that iTunes just knows is quite unsettling.”

A related “a-ha” moment that City of Sound is referencing here is the anticipatory glee of hearing how songs thematically concatenate — that is, how there seems to be a “hidden logic” between the song order, where the messages seem to be ordered with a purposeful coherence, or that there is a “hidden” will in operation, spelling out a secret message.  Like, if Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like I Do?” is followed — randomly — by a song that sounds like an answer (James Brown’s “I Feel Good”), an ironic response (Morris Albert’s “Feelings…nothing more than feelings…”) or even just another logical follow-up (”Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” by Culture Club).  It’s as if the ‘god in the machine’ is our own private DJ, mix-mastering a secret subtext. We imagine a human agency where there is only random chaos, granting the device the godlike powers we wish it had … but we know that these are really projections of our own desires and our own logic, reflected back to us when we weren’t prepared for it– an unexpected instance of the “omnipotence of thoughts.”

Is the message that we should “enjoy uncertainty” because we have no choice?  Is it a command in the imperative voice, or a plea, or simply a symptomatic response to the illnesses of our age?  Do these products assuage our fears, or pray on our insecurities?  Perhaps, after all, marketing gimmicks like these mean nothing, but Mapping the Marvelous marvels over the Shuffle in a profound way:

while the iPod shuffle slogan “Enjoy uncertainty” has prompted many ironic comments on the reliability of the device, for me it’s pure genius…I’m pretty sure that at some point, in retrospect, the iPod shuffle will be considered the icon of an age characterized by insecurity and the uncertainty of knowing.

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.