Shannon Strucci: The Uncanny Valley

I was reccomended by Amy Godliman to check out a video essay done by Shannon Strucci. It is based around the subject of the uncanny valley which can provide good research regarding the potential subject I have chosen. Children react strongly to visual stimuli, and in our modern world visual stimuli is often presented on our television screens. There is a strong yet mysterious link with children's media and the uncanny, it can show up in things like toys, videogames and TV shows. One thing that might appear harmless can easily be seen as something more uncertain.

I will write my thoughts on the video after viewing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv47dL-qbXk

Thoughts:

I am thankful that one of many things established at the beginning of this video essay is that the uncanny valley isn't exclusively limited to human subjects. Another is that the effects are also not limited to fear and identification.

Timestamp: 3:46

In reference to the terror of discovering something you thought was alive or real wasn't could be a different form of fear in itself. You were comfortable with a mannequin until you realise its a mannequin, that it did its job of being realistic too well, and that could tie the loss of faith, logic or even your own sanity.

I also agree that movement plays a key part in how we see the uncanny and how it repulses us.

I have played both Heavy Rain and Silent Hill 2, interesting examples to show the rise of motion capture in video games. Although I will admit that I wasn't creeped out heavy rain as the majority of characters weren't aggressors, whereas the enemies in silent hill 2 are. Plus Silent Hill 2 has the uncertainty as to wether the characters you meet could be helpful, dangerous, or just as lost as you are, which works much better to its advantage.

The effect sound can have on a silent film audience could provide a meta-textual fear that comes with the uncanny, to have what was once a coherent decade of silence is suddenly broken when you hear what the people on screen sound like. The uncanny power of sound is something greatly under estimated today with how to un-nerve people. The limitations of technology back then can very easily be used to good effect in horror movies today, such as a looping gramophone.

Uncanny Bodies seems like an interesting book. I might look into that.

Colour and image quality is just as important. It worked well for a film like psycho as well as it did for Frankenstein and Dracula. Black and white films also worked well for german expressionism in films like Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in which both leads and protagonists had big expressive eyes, ghostly faces and a distorted realm to wander.

Timestamp: 16:29

I am loving this particular section on how anthropomorphism can be applied the right way and the wrong way, and I think this plays a large part into the show that traumatised me as a tot.

Animals are just as complex if not more complex than humans, so when we typically apply anthropomorphic features onto an animal character there needs to be a right balance between human and beast. This works with children's media, in which simplifying a character makes them more appealing and expressive.

But it isn't just the matter of applying human features onto animals. It can apply to making an artificial re-creation that clearly doesn't match well with its animal counterpart. The cat is clunky, static, moves like a machine and meows out of a microphone, not a voicebox.

The uncanny does have its place in humour though, something that is obviously trying to be real but fails is something to be mocked and laughed at. Especially if it just sticks out like a sore thumb.

I do have my own stance on the cat drone being kind of demented in my opinion.

I think the violation on human norms theory is valid, and kind of says a lot on humans and society. How we identify, generalise, how what we fear and what we trust is defined.

It can apply to people who rarely seen a physically disabled person or someone of another enthicity, which could lead predjudices such as xenophobia or racism. So the uncanny is a human invention, both past and in the present, and an aspect of humankind that will live on in the future.

Maybe it wont just be robots or dolls we will fear in the future, maybe we will see something else that disturbs us on the same level.

Hayoa Miyazaki's statement that the tech demo shown is an insult to life and to the disabled friend he had says a lot about our flaws as humans and how we demonise whatever we see as unconventional or different. It isn't profound but it does say something about the greater horror at hand, that the majority of people(including us) are inherently judgemental and fearful to everything around us.

I don't entirely agree with all statements made, but this video essay has opened my mind a bit more in terms of the uncanny, and a potential way to use it in future designs. It would be interesting to explore how both primal fears and childhood fears are perhaps one in the same.