James Portnow and Daniel Floyd present a very articulate explanation of ‘uncanny valley’ theory for game developers in their animated lecture series for Edge-Online, “Video Games and the Uncanny Valley”. I particularly like the explanation of the pros and cons to the two strategies game designers and animators are using to approach the ‘problem’ — photorealism and stylization.

I discovered the “cover song” web podcast site, Coverville, earlier today, and was musing over the way in which one band’s version of another band’s overly familiar song can chime the chords of the uncanny. But then I saw this video for Sour’s “Hibi No Neiro” — which I don’t think is a cover song — and my chords were chimed directly. The unexpected synchronicity of the choreographed shots — across so many webcams (if that’s really what they did here) is pretty remarkable. As the writer at Coverville puts it accurately: this video is very “Michel Gondry” (who, incidentally, I just learned released a second volume to his classic Works DVD exclusively on his website!). Like Gondry’s work, it made me do a double-take in one of those “I can’t believe my eyes” sort of experiences. But it’s not really scary; it’s more of a celebration of the potential for social connectedness through internet technologies. Enjoy:

SOUR / 日々の音色 (Hibi no Neiro) MV from Magico Nakamura on Vimeo.

And here is my favorite all-time Michel Gondry video, adapting the Chemical Bros. song: “Let Forever Be”.

Last year, writer Jason Jack Miller shared with me a popular YouTube video: Uncanny monsters born by placing a layer of water and cornstarch on a subwoofer.  I find myself returning to this video often, contemplating the animism made possible by the rhythm of sound and the chaos of vibration. This neat effect “animates” the preternatural spatzle dough (a.k.a. “Oobleck”) in a way that makes it seem like the liquid gives birth to monstrous blobs that have a will to dance all their own. It gets progressively creepier until the “mass” writhes with uncanny life.

One of the reasons this neat trickery appeals to me is because it is also so familiar from fiction and film. This is but one of many examples of something we might call the “Oobleck Effect” in uncanny narratives: a representation of “living fluid” in the works of popular culture (especially film). Liquid, by its very nature, often seems animate since it is subject to gravity and other forms of push-and-pull in the natural environment. Ocean waves are scientifically explained, but one can’t help but wonder at the unseen forces that cause the phenomena — a ripple is a ghostly after-trace of an often unseen and unknown activity. Things stir underwater, and we see this after-effect — something is “there” but not quite there at all. Shark films like Open Water achieve much of their horror this way, by giving us a partial view — fin breaking through or not — as things move beneath the surface of the visible. But the Oobleck Effect is achieved with the surface itself takes on a life before our very eyes where we presumed there was no life whatsover. When liquid shapes are represented as “alive” in the arts, they become particularly uncanny objects. Perhaps because their monstrous bodies perform a sort of polymorphous perversity as much as they erase categorical distinctions based on physical boundaries and question the “natural” laws that we presume shape all organisms in any determined way. The liquid itself is as “alive”; we project sentience, if not outright ill intention, upon it.

Oobleck — a word that itself is derived from pop literature (Dr. Seuss) — is an effect apparent in the image of the T-1000 (or the “liquid metal” robot) from Terminator 2: Judgment Day who, by virtue of spectacular effects, seems as polymorphic as a postmodern shape-shifter, his metallic alloy bendable into any horrifying shape that will serve the purpose of disguise or murder. When he is melted in the lava-like smelt of the factory at the end of T2, his liquid body expresses numerous characters as he is returned to the mercurial hellfire — and this scene, as much as the one where he emerges from a puddle on a hospital room floor, is perhaps the best example of the Oobleck Effect at work in contemporary cinema.

The T-1000 is an iconic instance of the Oobleck Effect

I invite comments that cite other appearances of the Oobleck Effect in fiction, film and elsewhere in pop culture.

There was a particularly uncanny moment last night on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.  Wait for it:

The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien – Wax Figures, Redux

The wax/flesh boundaries are blurred in unexpected ways in that video that leave even Conan himself speechless about the “horrifying” result.  Wax figures may be inherently uncanny on their own, but the status of these figures as pop celebrities — on a pop celebrity show — placed in a men’s room, shifts the ground of the moment enough to render things even more unstable than they otherwise might be.

While searching for this skit online, I came across a classic Conan video featuring “The VentriloChoir in Budapest” that also was quite funny, with hilarious mockery of the human/puppet divide.  The band is great, but something about the “mass” of ventriloquists, singing in harmony, generates an unusual response — felt as uncanny, but perhaps touchingly beautiful, in its own way.  Another instance of popular folk art turning the uncanny toward alternative ends:

A public service announcement: The Addams Family is now streaming for FREE on YouTube, from MGM. A pastiche of horror fiction iconography — and also an indictment of the 50’s nuclear family, the conventions of the sitcom, and all things domestic — this show is perhaps one of the most interesting and clear-cut manifestations of the uncanny in popular culture. And it is still a riot.

I thank my colleagues at Seton Hill University, Laura Patterson and Maureen Vissat, for recently passing along a YouTube link to “Doll Face” by Andrew Huang. It’s a brilliant treatment of the relationship between media technology and gender identity, using uncanny structures like automatism and the compulsion to repeat to deliver its message.

The video sent me to Huang’s website, which features many stunningly uncanny animations worth sharing, analyzing, and potentially using in a college classroom. Huang’s art is more than “pop” but it appeals to the popular imagination through iconic treatements of domesticity-made-strange. His excellent short film, The Gloaming features deja vu in a disturbingly ominous way, reminiscent of the work of Jan Svankmajer or the Brothers Quay. Even his advertisements for Moo Studios use fantastic transformations of ordinary furniture and objects, giving them an unexpected life all their own. But his music video for Eric Avery’s “All Remote and No Control” is perhaps the most horrifying and uncanny of them all, as it represents the boundaries between the urban and the domestic under transgression by an almost Lovecraftian representation of nature — with chilling results. Here’s the version from YouTube, but a higher quality version is on Andrew Huang’s excellent website itself.

The Sultan’s Elephant is a giant marionette parade that is so artfully done, it strikes one as uncanny. As I wrote in November, most parade floats have an uncanny appeal, but in this case the doll’s appearance seems much less mechanical (ergo, more organic) than all the visible equipment and support needed to operate it. The eyes are what do it for me: on the elephant, especially, who’s segmented metallic trunk is a monstrosity. There is a backstory here, about an elephant who travels in a time machine, and it is inspired by the work of Jules Verne.

This is a traveling show that has been rebuilt as part of a much larger exhibit: Les Machines de L’ile Nantes (English: The Machines of the Isle of Nantes) — essentially a giant mechanical bestiary!

The video below reveals just how scary-yet-magical this all is. It’s a great instance of the uncanny in popular culture — and also a beautiful example of social/collective art.

[Thanks to writer Steve Vernon for calling my attention to this.]

Rob Horning’s recent essay in PopMatters — called “Doomed to Dilettantism” — performs an alarming and fantastic excoriation of the trend toward substituting “professionalism” in the arts with “amateurism” by consumers. Ingeniously, Horning connects the proliferation of faux-artisan strip mall stores like Michael’s (the chain craft store “Where Creativity Happens”) to the consumerist propensity for instant art without work found in such manufactured-but-ultimately-empty products for purchase like Paint-by-Numbers kits and Guitar Hero. These are simulacra that pre-package the artistic process, transforming it into a consumer item, slowly depreciating the cultural value of art in the process.

Horning’s essay is important, I think, especially in the way he ties all of this in to the economy. His article is not so much a snubbing of folk art or a call for a return to the great divide between high art and lowbrow, as it is a lament about the erasure of meaningful production altogether under capitalism. He’s captured what is so pathetic about games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band — whose karaoke appeal (as I discovered over the holidays personally) is really quite fun, but whose faux instruments are irrationally consumerist and whose existence would seem unfathomable a decade ago. As Horning points out: for the same price of the kit needed for Rock Band, you can buy real musical equipment! Instead of creating art what happens is that players are trained to play along, buying more and more accessories (available in an infinite shopping mall that opens up via online access, with its downloadable songs and pricey plastic “instruments” and much, much more). While a game like Rock Band does involve players in a team and there is a joissance to be experienced that is not unlike group dance, the truth is that even the relationships between players is a faux social relationship. The players’ attentions are mediated by the TV screen which must be studied and followed like a script, rather than performing as a harmonious ensemble, riffing off the sounds created by one another. Indeed, you often have to ignore your fellow players’ mistakes if you hope to survive, and the only impromptu action you can take is lifting your guitar into the air to pretend that you’re doing a solo. Yet the pleasure of the game comes when everyone is working in uncanny synchronicity, timed with the pulsing lights — we win when become the stars on the screen by rote repetition of the programmed score, keeping the machine streaming prefab sounds in a steady and uninterrupted stream. Mechanical reproduction is the objective. It is, ultimately, the very antithesis of artistic production.

Horning argues that such an activity deifies consumption and that this sort of artistic paradigm transforms how we relate to artwork. We see it as a collectible, rather than an experience. The “aura” of the artist dissipates, replaced by the commodity fetish. We begin to value quantity over quality, in order to display and advertise our pop culture status, rather than genuinely appreciating what it is we’re collecting, or attempting to create anything of use or cultural value on our own. In the case of paint-by-numbers art, we have no time to develop the skills required to refine our talents; we have no desire to work for pleasure. In the process, the arts become a deskilled industry — just like the handcraft of furniture making is replaced by push-button factory labor — and we subsequently become bored and alienated by the arts, driven only to fill the void with more and more stuff as we throw away one thing (or momentarily give tribute to it in the collection) and move on to the next one. The result is ultimately ennui and a quest to stave it off with more consumer goods that ultimately leave us dissatisfied all over again.

In games like Rock Band and Guitar hero, we don’t create the music: the music creates us, and we recognize this in the uncanny avatars that refract back to us, screaming and pounding the skins on our TV screens.

A cheeky November 2008 webisode on TrendHunterTv.com reveals just how strange American’s fascination with such things has become in “Faux Rockstar”:

Here in the USA, it’s Thanksgiving morning.  The annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC is just getting started, and while I’ve never been a fan of parades, one can’t deny their significance in both small town culture and in big city holiday fests, alike. The news media treat them like spectator sports. For the event in NYC, millions attend – and millions more watch on television.

The spectacle of the parade “float” has always amused me. There are many variations and technologies put into practice for these objects, from novelty floats to “balloonicles” — and many of them are fictional characters from animation history, appealing to children; chief among them are animal figures, simulacra of the actual animals which used to be carted down the street (ala circus parade). The aesthetic of “balloon animals” sends us back to our childhood, here returned larger than life and, often, animistically empowered.

Which is another way of saying that these moving platforms and inflated creatures don’t merely “parade” down the street: they spectrally float, seemingly on their own accord, and their creators do all they can to hide the mechanics that move them. Parade floats and balloons glide down main street, like stages built upon magic carpets or gigantic ghosts. The spectrality of the parade float is what lurks behind the laughable logic of the possessed Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (pictured above) who attacks Dan Ackroyd and crew in the horror-comedy, Ghostbusters (1984). Parades command attention because of the communal fascination with public spectacles, and the human feats of greatness (from celebrities to heroes to marching bands) compete against spectacles of technological wonder and art. Parade floats are in every way an exhibition of the popular uncanny.

I first began thinking seriously about this notion during an ad I witnessed at the movie theater last week: a rerun of the following Coca Cola Ad aired during the 2008 Super Bowl:

In this advertisement, cartoon characters (Stewie Griffin and Underdog) virtually fistfight over a Coke bottle, careening against buildings and bouncing off one another in ways that look “realistic” — yet also impossibly conscious of what they are doing. It is a neat trick of camera work and choreography (even if one assumes CGI is involved, the trickery is pretty savvy), lending the floats a sense of autonomy in their motivated quest to beat each other to the prize: a bottle of coke. A more peaceful and happy Charlie Brown comes almost out of nowhere to steal the bottle away from the distracted pair, his permanent grin expressing his glee. In the final frame, the Charlie “has a Coke and a smile.”

There’s a lot more going on here than first meets the eye. For instance, the ad uses a lot of “reaction shots” of human beings looking up to the sky or out of their skyscraper windows, which makes the constructed scene appear to be “really happening” in the city. One might even miss, in all of these reaction shots, the inside joke to fans of the Peanuts comic: right before Charlie Brown wins the day, a little brown-haired girl walks in the city park, looking up to the sky while holding a football, as if she was Lucy (known for pulling the ball away from Charlie just as he kicked at it — sending him flying in the air and landing flat on his back. This joke doesn’t just give give Charlie his wings — it elides the difference between human and non-human, real and imaginary, in the few seconds it appears on air. Film, of course, does this anyway: actors are not “really” there before us, but trace images, recorded in light and rendered larger than life.

Even more puzzling: the Coke bottle itself, a float, a commodity as big as the characters who seek it. Clearly it is far too much to consume in reality — yet they are driven to drink it. Unlike the other balloon creatures, it does not act in human ways, but instead seems to function more like a symbol that is preordained to magically find its way to Charlie’s hands. That is, it is a transcendent signifier for the commodity itself that they all represent.

This is all fantasy, framed to pitch a product by processing cultural icons that include not only the floats, but also the “larger than life” setting of the city itself. There may be an uncanny echo of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks operating in the political unconscious beneath this Coke advertisement. The “soft” bounce of these objects from childhood against skyscrapers may reflect a repressed fear of air attack on the city, here returned to the television screen as something akin to a childhood memory, a flight of animated fancy. The only people “threatened” by the horror of the giant balloons are those who aren’t paying attention to the spectacle in the streets, caught off guard. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the simple ad, but the imagery is striking.

The above image — appearing only for a second on the screen — seems to align Coke with the majesty of the city’s greatest icons. But it also implies so much more than that, especially given the context of “fighting” that it is embedded within. And in the image above, what are we to make of the clouds — the two lines like tracers of exhaust from two airplanes — arcing behind (or toward?) the Chrysler Building, while the shot as a whole is uncannily framed by two other “twin tower”-like buildings? I think it is patently obvious that this image is about fear as much as it is about fantasy.

One must wonder what the narrative of this ad might be saying about consumerism in relation to such cultural anxieties as global terrorism. Does it suggest something about competition, world trade, and terrorism? Is America the Charlie Brown, fooled by so many Lucies, so many wars? I’m not sure what it means, exactly, but I think there is some bottled up anxiety in this advertisement, felt as uncanny when it is uncapped and released.

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.]