My wife, Renate, recently submitted the entry above to Wired magazine‘s latest “Found: Artifacts from the Future” contest, which asks readers to predict the future of chewing gum with photoshopped gumpacks. Also on the site is Octuplemint — a parody of the most popular of uncanny of gums, Doublemint. For me, gum is an interesting… Continue reading Chewing Gum of The Future
The Machines of the Isle of Nantes
The Sultan’s Elephant is a giant marionette parade that is so artfully done, it strikes one as uncanny. As I wrote in November, most parade floats have an uncanny appeal, but in this case the doll’s appearance seems much less mechanical (ergo, more organic) than all the visible equipment and support needed to operate it.… Continue reading The Machines of the Isle of Nantes
Mock Band: The Simulation of Artistic Processes
Rob Horning‘s recent essay in PopMatters — called “Doomed to Dilettantism” — performs an alarming and fantastic excoriation of the trend toward substituting “professionalism” in the arts with “amateurism” by consumers. Ingeniously, Horning connects the proliferation of faux-artisan strip mall stores like Michael’s (the chain craft store “Where Creativity Happens”) to the consumerist propensity for… Continue reading Mock Band: The Simulation of Artistic Processes
LOLcats and Digital Doppelgangers
[Images below have been removed from site, 9/2014. The new website for totally looks like” is at http://memebase.cheezburger.com/totallylookslike ] If you don’t already know, LOLcats are artfully captioned photographs of animals, as in the image above. They’re pretty funny, entirely created by the visitors to icanhascheezburger.com (whose domain name refers to one of the first… Continue reading LOLcats and Digital Doppelgangers
The Uncanny Valley of Advertising
Russell Davies describes the invasiveness of advertising as approaching its own “uncanny valley” in a Nov 2007 post on his blog, advertising practitioner: It seems like we’re about to enter a period where our digital lives will be full of the online equivalents of those messages you find on your television when you check into… Continue reading The Uncanny Valley of Advertising
Surreal Estate
Point Click Home magazine features a fun slide show feature called “Surreal Estate”. I couldn’t help but think of Anthony Vidler’s book, The Architectural Uncanny, as I paged through the designs, real and imagined. If the “home” is where we store our secrets, their shells are the stuff of fantasy — permeable-yet-impenetrable, wondrous and scary.
My Unheimlich LibraryThing Books
My Library at LibraryThing [NOTE: Those covers above go to amazon.com with an “associate” link — this was necessary to include the widget with cover graphics. To just visit librarything, not amazon, click here!] What you see above is not a complete bibliography by ANY means. But over the past few years, I have slowly… Continue reading My Unheimlich LibraryThing Books
David Lynch’s Doppelgangers
In psychology, the shadow is the part of the unconscious that swallows threatening information and experiences that a conscious mind cannot hold onto and, at the same time, remain functional. However, a periodic confrontation with the shadow is necessary for a healthy psyche. In a Lynch film it is often the job of some sort… Continue reading David Lynch’s Doppelgangers
Smoking Stunts and Growths
Wow! This image from the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation’s (UK) anti-second hand smoke campaign stunned me for a moment, with its visual echo of my recent post about the website, Photoshop Disasters. (Via the excellent advertising watchblog, AdGoodness). In that original post, I wrote: “We always already understand that advertising is manipulative and fake, and yet when the flaw appears,… Continue reading Smoking Stunts and Growths
Gel Remote: Object Empathy and The Tactile Uncanny
Adbusters # 78 asks “What if design stood up for itself? What if instead of bowing immediately to our demands, design gently pushed back?” In the “Psychodesign” slideshow (by Sarah Nardi), products like Panasonic Design Company‘s experimental “Gel Remote” (above) are framed as a political use of the uncanny, animating the inanimate icons of everyday life in order to… Continue reading Gel Remote: Object Empathy and The Tactile Uncanny