Self-Uncanny

Abstract

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.

Salad Fingers: Pre-YouTube digital uncanny and the ‘weird’ future of animation

“…The series thus feels analogue despite its algorithmic, digital production. Thus, in this way and others, Salad Fingers aligns with Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli’s characterisation of the digital uncanny as a phenomenon that ‘unsettles and estranges concepts of “self,” “affect,” “feedback,” and “aesthetic experience,” forcing us to reflect on our relationships with computational media’ (Ravetto-Biagioli, 2019, p . 15).…”

“…Throughout this article, we outline how the uncanny and weird operate aesthetically in Salad Fingers , and in tandem we articulate how the series continues a long history of provocative ‘weirdness’ in visual art, film, and television while driving this longstanding mode in new directions associated with the dawn of the participatory web in the early 2000s. We argue that Salad Fingers is a foundational example of the ‘digital uncanny’, a concept that has been mobilised across a diverse range of contexts to describe how the digital can unsettle cultural and cognitive expectations (Coyne, 2005; Liu, 2010; Stamboliev and Jackson 2018; Ravetto-Biagoli 2019; Wasserman 2022). While the digital uncanny is not a fixed category, we contend that no genre or aesthetic mode is, because, as has been well established in genre studies, modes and genres are not stable (Altman, 1999; Naremore, 1998; Neale, 2000; Mittell, 2004).…”