We are confronted with a new type of uncanny experience, an uncanny evoked by parallel processing, aggregate data, and cloud-computing. The digital uncanny does not erase the uncanny feeling we experience as déjà vu or when confronted with robots that are too lifelike. Today’s uncanny refers to how nonhuman devices (surveillance technologies, algorithms, feedback, and data flows) anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions, and interactions, intimating we are machines and our behavior is predicable because we are machinic. It adds another dimension to those feelings we get when we question whether our responses are subjective or automated—automated as in reducing one’s subjectivity to patterns of data and using those patterns to present objects or ideas that would then elicit one’s genuinely subjective—yet effectively preset—response. This anticipation of our responses is a feedback loop we have produced by designing software that studies our traces, inputs, and moves. Digital Uncanny explores how digital technologies, particularly software systems working through massive amounts of data, are transforming the meaning of the uncanny that Freud tied to a return of repressed memories, desires, and experiences to their anticipation. Through a close reading of interactive and experimental art works of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Bill Viola, Simon Biggs, Sue Hawksley, and Garth Paine, this book is designed to explore how the digital uncanny unsettles and estranges concepts of “self,” “affect,” “feedback,” and “aesthetic experience,” forcing us to reflect on our relationship with computational media and our relationship to others and our experience of the world.
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.
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 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.
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