- Art and the Uncanny:Tapping the Potential
This article discusses the potential uses and benefits of “the uncanny.” It begins with a historical definition and continues through existing uses within the author’s body of work.
Links to supplemental materials such as audio or video files are listed at the end of this article.
My mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that’s what the world is like.
—Edward Gorey [1]
Conversations about modern composition are often facilitated by an early definition of boundaries. Identifying one’s niche discloses a great deal about artistic intent, perhaps most effective as a self-revelatory technique. Of primary interest to me are the niches created by the blurry dividing lines, by the unlikely merging of certain artistic practices that elicit feelings of discomfort and uncertainty in the viewer—an exploration of the uncanny. In this article I seek to examine possible definitions of the uncanny and their manifestations within my artistic output.
The definition of “uncanny” is understandably vague, as are many such words with powerful emotional attachment—“beyond the ordinary or normal” and “uncomfortably strange” do not begin to capture the true spirit of the word. There is a skin-crawling, not-quite-repulsive, impractically fearful state associated with the emotion that is impossibly complicated and wholly lost in the translation to language. Twentieth-century psychologist Ernst Jentsch explains the difficulty of capturing the essence of uncanny:
the same impression does not necessarily exert an uncanny effect on everybody. Moreover, the same perception on the part of the same individual does not necessarily develop into “uncanny” every time, or at least not every time in the same way [2].
With this ambiguity in mind, we might still compile a list of factors that can contribute to the uncanny and the relevant symptoms, borrowing from experts in the field. It is a revolving door of terror between familiar nostalgia and uncertain memories. It arises when one begins to doubt the presence of life within an animate being, or the lifelessness of a still object. It surges when a mechanical process juxtaposes with the ordinary imperfection of human life [3,4].
Robotics expert Masahiro Mori cites an excellent example:
One robot had 29 pairs of artificial muscles in the face (the same number as a human being) to make it smile in a humanlike fashion. . . . [A] smile is a dynamic sequence of facial deformations, and the speed of the deformations is crucial. When the speed is cut in half in an attempt to make the robot bring up a smile more slowly, instead of looking happy, its expression turns creepy. This shows how, because of a variation in movement, something that has come to appear very close to human—like a robot, puppet, or prosthetic hand—could easily tumble down into the uncanny valley [5].
Symptoms of one who has experienced an uncanny situation include disorientation, feelings of psychosis or insanity and mistrust of previously held beliefs [6].
While CGI and robotic developers are often seeking ways to overcome the negative effects of the “uncanny valley” [7] (Fig. 1), the usefulness of the uncanny as a positive artistic tool is apparent: one aspect of the tremendous appeal of great art is its ability to temporarily suspend and exploit one’s sense of reality within visual, aural and written contexts. Working with the uncanny allows for manipulation of the audience from the standpoint of the ego, simultaneously embracing and ridiculing a sense of solipsism. By describing the very familiar and illustrating the blandly normal, one can develop a comfortable situation for the viewer that allows the uncanny effect to take place through subsequent decoration borrowed from the truly strange. [End Page 75]
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To adapt these ideas into my artistic practice, I begin by creating situations that challenge the viewer’s and my sense of reality. Because the uncanny effect is...