The endless breath of smoke. The unexpected blink. The sudden nod. Visit the “Eternal Moments” gallery of cinemagraphs by Ana Pais for some stunning moments of the uncanny. The portfolio opens up with a citation from Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” that reads: “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats,… Continue reading Eternal Moments and Smoking Billboards
Category: New Media
Das Unheimliche in New Media: online animation, websites, computer games, software, and other electronic forms.
Strange Rain: An Uncanny Interactive Story for the iPad
STRANGE RAIN is a new iphone/ipad application (aka “app”) by Erik Loyer at opertoon.com that, simply, simulates looking through “a skylight on a rainy day.” Rain falls from the cloudy abyss “above” the viewer to splatter down on the glass of the device. Tilt the device and the atmosphere tilts back, too, maintaining a 3-dimensional… Continue reading Strange Rain: An Uncanny Interactive Story for the iPad
Lomography and the Uncanny
“Archaeological Photography, the Uncanny Valley, and Lomography” by Colleen Morgan touches on the way documentary images of archaeological sites use particular photographic techniques to produce an uncanny effect (whether consciously or not). I hadn’t heard of “lomography” before, which Morgan describes: “lomography…employs low-quality toy cameras for an intentionally “bad” photograph that is blurry, off-color with light… Continue reading Lomography and the Uncanny
Video Games and the Uncanny Valley: Photorealism vs. Stylization
James Portnow and Daniel Floyd present a very articulate explanation of ‘uncanny valley’ theory for game developers in their animated lecture series for Edge-Online, “Video Games and the Uncanny Valley”. I particularly like the explanation of the pros and cons to the two strategies game designers and animators are using to approach the ‘problem’ —… Continue reading Video Games and the Uncanny Valley: Photorealism vs. Stylization
You Are What You Urn
England’s Telegraph is running a “Best Pictures of The Year” gallery to wrap up 2009…and with images like the above from the “Weird Inventions” gallery — or even from their other bizarre and weird and spectacular galleries — one can only marvel over what a strange year it’s been…and how remarkably stranger it is going… Continue reading You Are What You Urn
The Addams Family Returns…Online
A public service announcement: The Addams Family is now streaming for FREE on YouTube, from MGM. A pastiche of horror fiction iconography — and also an indictment of the 50’s nuclear family, the conventions of the sitcom, and all things domestic — this show is perhaps one of the most interesting and clear-cut manifestations of… Continue reading The Addams Family Returns…Online
The Uncyclopedia
I love dismembered hand jokes as much as anyone else, but this creepy image grabbed my attention as the featured image of the day on Uncyclopedia — a mock Wikipedia wiki that I stumbled upon when searching the web for material on the surrealist, Rene Magritte. At first I didn’t even realize I was ON… Continue reading The Uncyclopedia
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
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