Self-Uncanny

Self-Uncanny looks at the interface between humans and digital technologies in the work of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, focusing on the screen as a site of encounter that is shadowed by surveillance and profiling devices. It begins by examining how interactive screens reposition us as users rather than just spectators. While the contemporary shift from spectator to user seems to offer more agency, it also questions our subjectivity. We are no longer treated as subjects or addressees, but as sources of information that is collected, analyzed, and sorted by algorithms—algorithms that see us as members of categories (age, gender, buying power, political outlook, etc.). We do experience the effects of such categorizations (like being turned down for a mortgage or denied access to healthcare), but we are not capable of experiencing how the categories our data profile has been put in affect our lives.

Introduction

The digital uncanny emerges when we confront massive empirical datasets that have the capacity to anticipate practices, responses, experiences, and expressions that previously have been used to distinguish the human from the nonhuman—thinking, empathy, and consciousness. The film Ex-Machina illustrates how the digital uncanny emerges from personalized targeting techniques, but it cannot account for the feelings we get when we interact with computational media. Narrative cinema treats its spectators as subjects that can recognize and identify with characters and situations. While film is immersive, it is not interactive, and cannot directly address the spectator nor install her in a feedback loop. With interactive media, however, spectators are not always addressed as subjects but they remain within the sensory, within the aesthetic element. Interactive artworks bypass a human-centered perspectival mode of viewing, but, at the same time, they do not simply assume machine vision takes over human perception. They simultaneously challenge the idea of a unified subject (whether inhuman, nonhuman or posthuman) as well as notions of singularity or renewed assertions of humanism.

Uncanny Aesthetics

Uncanny aesthetics examines how the discourse of the uncanny emerged from a reading of E. T. A Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman,” in the works of Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud, and how these readings have shaped the way we think about the uncanny as both experiential and aesthetic. These interpretations demonstrate, as Samuel Weber puts it, “a certain indecidability” between what we personally experience and what is predetermined. The uncanny has, however, shifted from a fear of confronting unhuman objects to the fear of being exposed to others beyond the devices and programs with which we have intimate relations, and the existential crisis of not measuring up to the technologies that simulate us.

Uncanny Feedback

Combining dance with digital and sound art, the performances of Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine produce uncanny effects at the interface of the movement of the performer’s body with the software and technological apparatus that track, map, and interact with it. In Bodytext, Crosstalk, Blowup and Dark Matter the uncanny is neither presented as a questioning of subjectivity nor does it emerge from the viewer’s experience of the artwork, but is rather created within the artwork itself, from the feedback among its different interacting elements. “Uncanny Feedback” examines how interactivity between humans and digital media generates uncanny events. Interactivity is not simply a play of surface effects but a complex interactive performance that explores the inter-relationships between kinesthetic experiences and memory, muscle memory and intentional movement, and dance as an imagined movement, a form of interaction, gesture and response to voice recognition, sonification and audio programming.

Uncanny Affect

“Uncanny Affect” examines ghostly gestures that we cannot consciously experience but only perceive through digital technologies. The work of Bill Viola, one of today’s best-known video artists, focuses on the intersections of new media and the metaphysics of human experiences like death, consciousness, spirituality, and emotion. Many of his recent installations manipulate our sense of time by using a “Phantom camera” that is able to create an extreme slow-motion effect when played back at normal speed. These high-definition installation art works produce the simultaneous disappearance of the readable (intentional movements, iconic gestures, and performative emotions) and the appearance of previously imperceptible micro-movements (facial tics and gestural twitches). They visualize what we cannot experience as embodied perception. This generates uncanny visceral affects. Rather than offering us a new understanding of human interiority (suffering, elation, anger and spirituality), Viola’s work leaves us only with uncertainty as a visceral affect.