Freud is concerned to argue polemically against the location of [Hoffman's story's] uncanny effect in the figure of "the living doll" Olympia [...] Freud's alternative reading privileges instead the Sandman (who as Freud points out gives his name to the story) over Olympia the doll-woman, as the source of the feeling of the claims, is the refiguration in fantasy of the universal male Oedipal situation of childhood and its accompanying castration complex [...].' This reference to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand Schelling's definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. See Freud, 'The "uncanny"', pp. 222-23.
Walking into an empty room the gaze of an enormous single eye on a screen detects and follows you ( fig. 1). As you stop and stare back at this extreme close-up image, you examine the details-capillaries in the white of the eye; hair follicles on the surface of the skin; wrinkles; a myriad of blue, green, and brown pigmentation in the iris; and the speed and motion of a single blink. The eye, in return, tracks your movements with great accuracy, insisting on keeping contact until you turn away, peering at you even as you exit. While it maximizes all the features of the human eye, it behaves like a machine-one of those robotic closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras that capture all gestures, features, and actions. Unlike the mechanism in the human eye that sends visual signals to the brain, this enormous eye is completely blind. It seems to detect and follow spectators, but its gaze is directed not by its own vision but by the input it receives from separate mechanisms of detection ("sightless vision" machines) 2 that drive its movements. The movement of this eye is the mere visualization of how this network of machines targets the spectator. It parodies the icon of the divine all-seeing eye, the eye of providence appearing on the back of an American dollar bill, the telescreen in Orwell's 1984, or the gaze of the modern security state. A B S T R A C T This essay explores how the large-scale video-installation art of RafaelLozano-Hemmer uses the illusion of confrontation, contact, and interactivity to create what many spectators describe as an uncanny experience. Like Freud's uncanny, Lozano-Hemmer's work undermines stable subject positions and thus the possibility of the specific symbolic meaning for the installation. The ungrounding of subjectivity does not necessarily point to the subjects' own absence or lack of wholeness, nor to its own possible obsolescence. Rather, it points to the disjuncture between recognizing and reacting to the fact that we are being followed (by images, interfaces, and tracking devices), and recognizing and reacting to the fact that these devices already anticipate our movements, desires, and trajectories. Lozano-Hemmer's work asks about how surveillance systems, global capital, and digital technologies have reconfigured notions of embodiment and public space, and of the public itself. / REPRESENTATIONS 111. Summer 2010
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