I was excited to see that Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst recently won the British Fantasy Award for “Best Non-Fiction” with last year’s important release from dead ink books, called WRITING THE UNCANNY: Essays on Crafting Strange Fiction. Coxon and Hirst’s book is an excellent anthology of mostly-UK writers sharing their strategies for writing… Continue reading Review: Writing the Uncanny: Essays on Crafting Strange Fiction (Coxon & Hirst, 2021)
Tag: articles
Arnzen Interviewed by Heidi Ruby Miller for SIGMA
Shortly before my presentation on The Popular Uncanny at PARSEC last month, Heidi Ruby Miller interviewed me about the subject for their newsletter, SIGMA. You can read the full interview in .pdf format here; an excerpt follows… Excerpt: Miller: Why should we care about the uncanny, popular or not? Arnzen: The uncanny has been becoming… Continue reading Arnzen Interviewed by Heidi Ruby Miller for SIGMA
Data Doppelgangers feature in The Atlantic
There is you. And then there is your alter-ego as constructed by all the hidden marketing that happens behind the scenes due to your social networking. You can try to control it through things like facebook’s latest privacy adjustment techniques. But as tech critic Sara M. Watson points out in a recent article in The… Continue reading Data Doppelgangers feature in The Atlantic
Reanimating Dead Photos with New Media Animation
Last year I wrote about the uncanny aura of “Cinemagraphs” — a.k.a. “animated GIFs” in a posting called “Eternal Moments and Smoking Billboards”. I made the point that these images are “an uncanny artform, because it literally “brings to life” still frames — and while this may in some ways be more apparent in stop-motion… Continue reading Reanimating Dead Photos with New Media Animation
Toys of Terror
I have a short story in the new issue of Diabolique magazine and was excited to see that it also includes a good feature story by Brandon Kosters called “Toys of Terror” — a good overview of the appearance of “scary dolls” as baddies in horror film (from Chucky in Child’s Play to Corky in… Continue reading Toys of Terror
The Uncanny Valley: Expanded and Uncut! Notes on Mori’s Groundbreaking Essay
I like to think I’m good at keeping up with research on the Uncanny, but somehow I missed an important event this June: IEEE Spectrum published the first complete English translation of Masahiro Mori’s highly influential article on “The Uncanny Valley” (originally published in what they call “an obscure Japanese journal called Energy in… Continue reading The Uncanny Valley: Expanded and Uncut! Notes on Mori’s Groundbreaking Essay
Review of Pea Green Boat (Spring 2012) — Special Issue on The Uncanny
Pea Green Boat is an online magazine of curious and compelling miscellany, publishing issues that collect articles and snippets on unique themes. The current issue of PGB (Spring 2012) focuses on The Uncanny. I should say up front that one of my articles, on “Eyebombing,” is reprinted from this very site. But PGB’s Uncanny issue… Continue reading Review of Pea Green Boat (Spring 2012) — Special Issue on The Uncanny
The Uncanny in your Inbox — and a Book in your Mailbox
A brief alert to let readers of this blog and fans of all things “uncanny” know that my latest book is a large collection of micropoetry — called The Gorelets Omnibus. Aside from hundreds of twisted (and sometimes funny) horror poems, it features a collection of academic articles written about the gorelets project (by critics… Continue reading The Uncanny in your Inbox — and a Book in your Mailbox
The Uncanny Design of Robot Heads
While theories of the “uncanny valley” are debatable (see Hanson’s “Upending the Uncanny Valley” (.pdf)), the quest for human-like androids and automatons continue to compel their designers. At Carnegie-Mellon University’s anthropomorphism.org, I found an interesting early study of robot head design that shows how these designers sometimes make choices about when to make robots anthropomorphic… Continue reading The Uncanny Design of Robot Heads
Uncanny Digital Literacies: Defamiliarization in The Classroom
Just found this neat Prezi presentation on “Uncanny Digital Literacies” by Sian Bayne, from the ESRC seminar series on Literacy in the Digital University (University of Edinburgh, 16 Oct 2009). I like the free-floating zoomieness of Bayne’s presentation, but with an ‘absent’ presenter, it is a little difficult to make the ideas and images cohere.… Continue reading Uncanny Digital Literacies: Defamiliarization in The Classroom