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
Tag: hands
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
Photoshop Disasters and the Fantasy of Picture Perfection
Photoshop Disasters is a funny weblog that collects flawed design elements in advertisements and elsewhere (like the above image from a Sears Catalog). The accidental amputations, bizarre hands, and other forms of freakish anatomical blunders strike a viewer as uncanny when you spot them in what would otherwise be a “picture perfect” advertisement. We always… Continue reading Photoshop Disasters and the Fantasy of Picture Perfection
Creepy Automata Videos
For Halloween, the readers of Oobject voted for their Top 12 Videos of Creepy Automata. A great theme, from cats in a milk churn to maniacally laughing dolls. One of my favorites is this clip of a Decaying 1880s Automaton Harpist by Vichy: I won’t belabor how uncanny the signifiers are here, from the doll’s… Continue reading Creepy Automata Videos
The Uncanny Hands of Horror Fiction
I’ve just posted an annotated list of “Classic Dismembered Hand Stories” on my creative writing weblog, The Goreletter. (This “hands” list was originally scheduled to appear in The Book of Lists: Horror, but was cut for space — but I do have another article in that book on “Top Horror Colleges”!). Stories about dismembered… Continue reading The Uncanny Hands of Horror Fiction
Devil’s Horns and the Evil Eye
A little known fact (to me, anyway…and it may not be a fact at all) about signs of the horns (aka “Devil’s Horns” aka “the Goat” aka “Satan Fingers”): Though not necessarily the first to ever use [horned hand gestures] in a “rock” setting, [heavy metal singer Ronnie James] Dio was without question the one… Continue reading Devil’s Horns and the Evil Eye