Das Unheimlich

Forlatt hus, Åmdalen

2009-09-15T12:48:00.001-07:00

Forlatt hus, Åmdalen - Abandoned eerie house, originally uploaded by 彡erlingsi.

"The house provided an especially favored site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits." p.17 Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992.

Crowning

2008-05-21T23:26:00.001-07:00

found treasure, originally uploaded by agnisflugen.

"I can see the head"

Call for Papers

2008-03-05T08:03:00.000-08:00

Uncanny Media: The Gothic Shadows of Mediation

Interdisciplinary conference, artistic Salon and Gothic event hosted by the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands 7-9 August 2008

Confirmed keynotes: Fred Botting • Steven Bruhm • Jeffrey Sconce

To tell a story is always to invoke ghosts. The act of narration, by nature, invites the spectres of the past, and is haunted by long-hidden anxieties or desires. The uncanny is an indispensable part of storytelling; it is the unrepresented lurking behind presentation, the unknown saliently present in the known. Nor is it only literature that is uncannily destabilized by its own technology; indeed, every act of mediation, be it textual, visual or auditory, evokes a Gothic conflation of overlapping temporalities and realities.

Examples of uncanny mediation are as numerous as they are varied. David Lynch has experimented with the uneasy borders between mediation and reality in the dreamlike topology of his films; Patrick McGrath allows the voice of past trauma to simultaneously narrate and haunt the literary present; rock bands from Bauhaus to Apoptygma Berzerk employ music technology to lend the ghosts of the Goth a voice; daily life has acquired a spectral dimension through the virtual ‘absent presence’ of wireless technology; and, like many other emblems of the uncanny, Dracula has been renarrated, remediated and re-enacted in film, literature, and computer games.

How can we describe the uncanny agency of media in such phenomena? To what extent does the book, the camera, the iPod, or the computer invite ghosts, create a voyeur, or a doppelganger? How does this shadow side of mediation influence our perception of the Real, the virtual, the unconscious, the Self? And what happens when the uncanny itself is mediated? Can we create spectral reflections of the spectre, a hyperreality of the simulacrum?

This conference aims to raise interdisciplinary discussions regarding mediation and uncanniness. Papers on both historical and contemporary topics are welcome. Possible themes include but are not limited to

Ø Mediating the uncanny: literature, film, music, computer games
Ø Spectrality and hauntology of mediation and technology
Ø Reality, hyperreality and simulacra
Ø Mediation of the Self: online identities and technological doppelganger
Ø Schizophonia, ventriloquism and backmasking in auditive media
Ø Dreams and the unconscious
Ø Spiritualism and mediumship

Proposals should include the name and contact details of the proposer, the title of the proposal and an abstract of no more than 250 words. Please send proposals to Isabella van Elferen, isabellavanelferen@uncannymedia.nl The deadline for proposals is 1 April 2008.
The conference website will be updated regularly. It can be found at www.uncannymedia.nl.
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Luminosity

2007-08-23T01:55:00.001-07:00

mannequins in the mist, originally uploaded by annette62.

Cage

2007-03-28T12:08:00.001-07:00

, originally uploaded by 'stpiduko'.

The Uncanny Valley

2006-11-30T15:03:00.000-08:00

Of course, human beings themselves lie at the final goal of robotics, which is why we make an effort to build human-like robots. For example, a robot's arms may be composed of a metal cylinder with many bolts, but to achieve a more human-like appearance, we paint over the metal in skin tones. These cosmetic efforts cause a resultant increase in our sense of the robot's familiarity. Some readers may have felt sympathy for handicapped people they have seen who attach a prosthetic arm or leg to replace a missing limb. But recently prosthetic hands have improved greatly, and we cannot distinguish them from real hands at a glance. Some prosthetic hands attempt to simulate veins, muscles, tendons, finger nails, and finger prints, and their color resembles human pigmentation. So maybe the prosthetic arm has achieved a degree of human verisimilitude on par with false teeth. But this kind of prosthetic hand is too real and when we notice it is prosthetic, we have a sense of strangeness.

Mori, Masahiro, Bukimi no tani [The uncanny valley], trans. K. MacDorman & T. Minato, Energy, Vol 7 No 4 (1970), pp. 33–35.

Eyeless

2006-11-05T12:32:00.000-08:00

Head for the Beach
Originally uploaded by alterednate.

The Sandman

2006-10-27T02:24:00.000-07:00

My father silently and gloomily drew off his dressing gown, and both attired themselves in long black frocks. Whence they took these I did not see. My father opened the door of what I had always thought to be a cupboard. But I now saw that it was no cupboard, but rather a black cavity in which there was a little fireplace. Coppelius went to it, and a blue flame began to crackle up on the hearth. All sorts of strange utensils lay around. Heavens! As my old father stooped down to the fire, he looked quite another man. Some convulsive pain seemed to have distorted his mild features into a repulsive, diabolical countenance. He looked like Coppelius, whom I saw brandishing red-hot tongs, which he used to take glowing masses out of the thick smoke; which objects he afterwards hammered. I seemed to catch a glimpse of human faces lying around without any eyes - but with deep holes instead.

'Eyes here' eyes!' roared Coppelius tonelessly. Overcome by the wildest terror, I shrieked out and fell from my hiding place upon the floor. Coppelius seized me and, baring his teeth, bleated out, 'Ah - little wretch - little wretch!' Then he dragged me up and flung me on the hearth, where the fire began to singe my hair. 'Now we have eyes enough - a pretty pair of child's eyes,' he whispered, and, taking some red-hot grains out of the flames with his bare hands, he was about to sprinkle them in my eyes.

My father upon this raised his hands in supplication, crying: 'Master, master, leave my Nathaniel his eyes!'

Whereupon Coppelius answered with a shrill laugh: 'Well, let the lad have his eyes and do his share of the world's crying, but we will examine the mechanism of his hands and feet.'

And then he seized me so roughly that my joints cracked, and screwed off my hands and feet, afterwards putting them back again, one after the other. 'There's something wrong here,' he mumbled. 'But now it's as good as ever. The old man has caught the idea!' hissed and lisped Coppelius. But all around me became black, a sudden cramp darted through my bones and nerves - and I lost consciousness. A gentle warm breath passed over my face; I woke as from the sleep of death. My mother had been stooping over me.

Hoffmann, E. et.al. Tales of Hoffmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.

Dead Ringers

2006-09-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

surgical fetishism... is another form of 'perverse' sexuality which would be interesting to analyze in a Deleuzio-Guattarian context. Surgical 'fetishism' is somewhat of a misnomer, as it does not deal with psychoanalytic fetishism but with forming new and different connections between bodies, organs and tools. Surgical fetishism is more like Deleuze and Guattari's masochism in that it is understood psychoanalytically and clinically in a different way to reading it as a becoming Body without Organs. While the films of Cronenberg, particularly Dead Ringers (Canada, 1988) would seem appropriate examples, the uncanny doubling and particularly the use of investigative and explicitly gender specific surgical tools in the film to interrogate the female interior prevents the film from really challenging psychoanalytic relations of desire. The Mantle twins are compelled to reveal an (albeit deformed) plane in the body of women rather than create new folds.

McCormack, Patricia 'Necrosexuality' Rhizomes, No. 11 / 12, Fall 2005 / Spring 2006

http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/maccormack/index.html

The Fictional Anatomy of Cartoon Characters

2006-09-01T04:24:00.000-07:00

Arario Gallery, Korea
Hyungkoo Lee: Animatus

Self Other Self

2006-08-30T11:30:00.000-07:00

doppelganger
Originally uploaded by darcey kimiko.

"I" and "Not I"

2006-08-29T16:59:00.001-07:00

The double, both in literature and out of it, is an enormous and seductive subject. As an imagined figure, a soul, a shadow, a ghost or a mirror reflection that exists in a dependent relation to the original, the double pursues the subject as his second self and makes him feel as himself and the other at the same time. While its imaginative power springs from its immateriality, from the fact that it is and has always been a phantasam, the psychological power of the double lies in its ambiguity, in the fact that it can stand for contrast or opposition, but likeness as well.

M. Zivokvic, The Double as the "Unseen" of Culture: Towards a Definition of the Doppelganger Linguistics and Literature Vol.2, No 7, 2000 p. 122

Mouth

2006-08-24T10:26:00.000-07:00

Twilight Circus II : The Faceless Clown
Originally uploaded by TommyOshima.

Broken

2006-08-21T13:32:00.000-07:00

Mannequin Assembly
Originally uploaded by Nadya Peek.

Ingenious Dolls

2006-08-17T02:08:00.000-07:00

When we proceed to review the things, persons, impressions, events and situations which are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in a particularly forcible and definite form, the first requirement is obviously to select a suitable example to start. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance 'doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate'; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata....Jentsch writes: 'In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton, and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately." That, as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional effect of the thing.

Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. & trs. James Strachey, vol. XVII (London: Hogarth, 1953), pp. 219-252.