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!

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.

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

I’ve started building a ‘Listmania’ of Uncanny-related books on amazon.com. Recommendations via comments are most welcome.

This is all part of my renewed interest in all things Amazon.com and ebooks. I just ordered the new, international version of the Kindle 2, and I’m very excited. Read all about it on my horror writing blog here. I am considering making this weblog — The Popular Uncanny — also available to Kindle readers….but I’m not sure, because I don’t post entries daily, like most blogs, and amazon charges a subscription fee for its many titles. Please leave a comment if you would like to see this, or whatever else you’d like to see more of on this blog.

[ Related Post: My Unheimlich LibraryThing Books ]

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”.

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.

I love dismembered hand jokes as much as anyone else, but this creepy image grabbed my attention as the featured image of the day on Uncyclopedia – a mock Wikipedia wiki that I stumbled upon when searching the web for material on the surrealist, Rene Magritte.  At first I didn’t even realize I was ON the Uncyclopedia, and as I read the parodic material on the surrealist master I thought to myself, “How clever…some cheeky monkey had fun “culture jamming” with the open source editing of the wikipedia and pulled a surrealist technique on the very surrealist himself.”  But then I figured it out and realized — they “got me.”

A site like Uncyclopedia lures the unwary google searcher into its trap.  Caught off guard, I fell into the hall of mirrors of parody — the doubling of the double — and experienced a twinge of the uncanny.  Somehow I felt on safer ground when I subsequently found the “actual” wikipedia — not on its “correct” page dedicated to Magritte, but its page on the Uncyclopedia itself.  The wikipedia’s Magritte page no longer feels stable to me…it all seems to suggest something parodic waiting to be discovered.

Everything “un-” is uncanny (“the prefix -un,” Freud tells us, “is the token of repression”). There is a degree to which my destabilizing experience of the Uncyclopedia reflects the power of das Unheimlich to redefine assumptions about boundary lines, categories, and reason itself.  Unreason, if only for a moment,  goes “all in,” and gets the upper hand.

Magritte’s own description of his work bears repeating, since there is the notion of the “hidden secret” inherent behind not only vision, but also every truth claim:

It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.

If you don’t already know, LOLcats are artfully captioned photographs of animals, as in the image above. They’re pretty funny, entirely created by the visitors to icanhascheezburger.com (whose domain name refers to one of the first LOLcat images that got widely distributed online and started this whole thing).  Like many online “sharing” sites, I consider LOLcats a fantastic form of new media folk art that attests to the popular draw of the uncanny.

How can a cute little kitten be “uncanny”?  The given framework for these captioned photos imbues the subject of the image (the cat) with a language it does not speak (a regressive, childlike “kitten” language of its own invention that gives the cat a distinctive “voice”), blurring the boundary between human and animal.  Freud calls this “the omnipotence of thoughts” in his article on “The Uncanny” — a psychological projection inherent to animistic beliefs and anthropomorphic fantasies.  Thus, it is quite normal that this unnatural and imaginary language of the LOLCAT is the equivalent of “baby speak”:  the animals are really like children more than they are like cats.  The language in the caption, moreover, matches the human-like expressions and gestures in the image so well that a spectator may be struck by the synchronicity at play, and perhaps feels the uncanny affect because reality (these are actual photos) and fantasy (the imagined/joke situation identified by the caption) become blurred, if only for a moment, springing us into laughter.  Not all the LOLcat images are about danger and death (as the one above — “nositz!”), and rarely are they “dark” or “scary” in their affect, but the humor can be intellectually unsettling because there is often a “secret” desire that the cat seems to be expressing in its caption which also reminds us of Freud’s discussion of the Uncanny as an expression of that which was to remain a secret (for him, the Repressed), suddenly returned and revealed.  Our childhood wishes (for a pet, like a doll, that can talk) seem actualized.

Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, that the group responsible for “LOLCats” would build on their popularity by hosting a similar “photoshopping” site in the form of a “doppelganger” maker: totallylookslike.com.

The pictures that users upload speak for themselves, by displaying side by side graphic associations.  Most users upload pictures of celebrities and film characters that look alike, as if they were unintentional “doubles” for one another by virture of their physical features and poses.

What makes this “uncanny” is not simply that they look like long-lost-twins, but they also provide the sort of “a-ha!” moment of recognition that Freud talks about in his essay on “Das Unheimliche” — the click of comprehending a “secret” correspondence, as if — with the image above, for instance — the unspoken inspiration behind Tim Burton’s artistic treatment of The Penguin was suddenly unveiled. 

Of course, there are also “natural” lookalikes, or body doubles in the popular imagination.  More common on totallylookslike.com are jokester post that bend the rules a bit to generate humor in ways that touch on uncanny similarities to make a point.

Here we have “New York” — a realiTV personality — matched up with Janice, a character from The Muppet Show. Yes, they both wear too much mascara and lip gloss. Is that a sufficient condition for them to be lookalikes? Or is this simply a photographic slur? 

What makes this “uncanny” is not simply the unexpected correspondence between the appearances of these TV “celebrities,” but the momentary confusion that opens up between puppet and human being when first glancing at the images side-by-side. Consciously or not, there is a degree to which the person who is making this visual pun is calling “New York” no more than a media puppet. The aggression “revealed” by the uncanny logic of this joke could betray a racist or sexist hostility, as well.  But beyond this hostility, perhaps there lurks a suggestion that this form of folk art has the ability to disempower the dominance of mass marketed artforms, such as the ”manufactured” celebrities and characters of popular TV, through uncanny expressions of mockery and parody. 

The site, at its most brilliant, can be relevatory of how forms of new media folk art perform populist expressions of resistance to (if not an outright subversion of) dominant discourses, by taking familiar images of power and status (often embodied by celebrities) and employing them in unintended ways to make a counterpoint. Above, the Vogue magazine cover is taken to task for not only suggesting something racist in its treatment of an African American basketball star as an animal (its “King Kong” reference — which is similar to the Muppet joke above), but also by lowering the ‘high fashion/high art’ status of Vogue down to the level of mere propaganda (the Army poster that originally intertextually borrowed from Kong).

Of course, the comparison attempted in the ‘totallylookslike’ image above is a bit of a stretch on behalf of the person who posted it, because they could have easily just paired the Vogue cover with an image from the King Kong film itself, which it clearly alludes to. Thus, we feel the critic, rather than the creator, at play, being highly selective, and the joke therefore doesn’t quite succeed on the level of the uncanny. Anything smacking of a critical human agency at play — a mediator — reduces the uncanny affect to a mere joke.  The person who is making the comparison cannot be present for the uncanny response to “work” — it is like spotting the zipper on the monster’s back in a horror film:  it betrays artifice and it’s “magic” is therefore disempowered.

In the above, a rock band’s album cover is equated to a familiar popular photograph that tabloid journalists famously proclaimed to be proof of an alien landscape or the “face of god” on Mars. The supernatural “face” is apparent in the accidental cast of shadow, itself an uncanny appearance.  But anyone looking at the image of Queen next to it recognizes the latter as a carefully posed and purposely abstract work of photographic art, if not also a nostalgic memory of something they may have forgotten in their record collection.  It is a clever comparison.  And it’s quite funny.  But it’s not quite uncanny. What we have, actually, is art referring to art — photos referring to other photos — and ultimately this is true of the entire site. 

What the site really shows us is consumers of popular culture trying to make sense out of the infinite stream of messages and images that circulate in the media.  That sense can only be an allusion or a visual pun – the associative logic of the dreamwork.  What is the dream of icanhascheezburger.com?  Perhaps it is about what its namesake reveals:  an inner child crying for junk food.  Only here we have the commodification of art into something resembling a cheesburger.  The dream-wish expressed by the site depends on a withdrawal from reason and a repression of our awareness that popular art is a commodity, a manufactured experience that substitues for the authentic.  By pointing out the “doppelgangers” of mass culture through visual puns and pop culture allusions, the site is like a church of the popular uncanny, its posters bearing witness to “miracles” of fantastic correspondence.

[NOTE: Those covers above go to amazon.com with an "associate" link -- this was necessary to include the widget with cover graphics. To just visit librarything, not amazon, click here!]

What you see above is not a complete bibliography by ANY means. But over the past few years, I have slowly been adding books from my collection to LibraryThing.com — a nerdy site for amateur librarians, bibliophiles, English major types and book fetishists. The site includes a widget for adding a link to books in one’s “library” elsewhere, so I am sharing it (image above) with links/covers to my books “tagged” as uncanny. It’s not complete and it still needs to be updated…but I wanted to include it here anyway.

The site is a pretty useful library for research, I think. If you click through to librarything.com, you can do a full search for all titles tagged as “uncanny” on their site, which might be helpful in research. Or you can read all the other books exhibited in my profile…it’s like snooping around on another person’s bookshelf.

Dr. Rob McMinn (the UK teacher behind the We Study Media edublog) offers up a nice Powerpoint “slideshare” from his courses, which gives a succinct overview of Freud’s work on the uncanny (das Unheimliche) in relation to horror texts and the media.

I particularly liked this slide below (#10), because it serves up the way that oppositional binaries structure the theory, especially in terms of the role of “secrets” in the private and the public (un-private?) spheres.

I recently came across The Blog of the Damned — a group weblog that has compiled some interesting instances of “forteana 2.0 and the uncanny internet.”

One entry in particular really jumped out at me: The Browser as Scrying Tool — that is, the literalization of the metaphor that “the Internet is haunted, and that the clients we use, our browsers, IM softwares, IRC clients etc., might be thought of as crystal balls, or Ouija boards.”

The site refers back to Gareth Howell’s Digital Me master’s project, which includes a page about “ghosts” on the internet and comes to a poetic conclusion:

…the haunted Internet isn’t about ghosts. It’s about us. It’s us who haunt the Internet, it’s us who leave disembodied traces of a life lived. It’s us who appear out of nowhere to others in chat rooms, Google searches and online worlds. It’s us who are desperate to communicate, to understand our lives and histories, and to find peace.

I think this is quite accurate: online media becomes a projective screen upon which desires and fears — often desires and fears ABOUT new media itself — are frequently played out. (I recently purchased Jeffrey Sconce’s book, Haunted Media, which delves into the communications theory involved here, and will likely blog more about this book in depth later on). Contributing to this interest in the “afterlife” online is the fact that our online personalities can outlive us (as Lord Andrews points out in his blog entry, “The Wired and the Dead”): traces of life linger in the ether.

In the concluding chapter of my upcoming book, The Popular Uncanny, I also make the argument that structures of the uncanny underpin a great deal of what we do when we interface with cyberspace technologies. The Ouija board is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It is little wonder that you can ask a Ouija board a question online at Museum of the Talking Boards — or that you can ask questions while holding your palm over the planchette at witchboard.com — because the mouse and the visual pointer (usually an arrow on your screen — but sometimes an icon of a disembodied hand) which are virtually identical to the pointer-over-letters structure of the spiritualist board. (In fact, a very early computer game using a modified mouse was Gypsy, a Ouija styled game.) Similar analogues can be found everywhere online, including the most popular page on the internet: whenever you type a question into google, and click on the I’m Feeling Lucky button (instead of the “search” button), you might as well be asking the search engine to summon an answer to your question from the great beyond.

If surfing the web is like scrying on a Ouija board, then why doesn’t it frighten us away? The answer might be simply that we see our side of the terminal as an extension of ourselves — that the internet is not quite Other enough to instill us with dread. One of the elements of all this that make the “strangely familiar” all the more “familiar” and domestic is that so much of the web is modeled off of other media — the Ouija board was an artifact of popular culture from the late 20th century, and itself was an artifact of spiritualist culture from days of old. This transmedia repackaging of older forms of media (and literally spirit “media”) into something new makes it all the more “safe” since it is familiar, despite its connections to the traditionally occult and uncanny.

But the manufacturing of nostalgia is never quite enough to dispel the anxiety we might feel when we encounter the uncanny online: the potential for encountering an uncanny surprise still awaits behind every click of the mouse. From “pop-up” windows that spring like a Jack-in-the-Box onto our screens to the disembodied “voices” of people long gone in online mortuary guestbooks or websites left in their wake, the internet is a space that is constructed much like an uncanny haunted house, and behind every “home” page lurks the potential reminder that this virtual world is as “un-home-like” (unheimlich) as it is yet another staple of our living rooms and home offices. The windowpane is familiar; what lurks on the other side of it is always potentially frightening, weird, and strange.

[p.s. I'm blocking comments on this post because it is drawing much spam...]