Recording

Hiroshi Ishiguro and his robot the Geminoid, made to resemble his likeness. As Ishiguro aged, he later got plastic surgery to look more like the robot. Article

Freud

• Freud on the uncanny: not the strangely mysterious, but the strangely familiar [full text here: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf]
  • the doppelgänger — a person's double — is an example
  • for Freud, the uncanny is completely subjective because it is a feeling that comes from what is familiar to you. Freud believed the uncanny feeling came from a repressed part of yourself that was reacting to something your conscious self could not permit knowing (here again, Lacan's Real insists on finding a way into your imagined, limited notion of yourself and the world)
  • an interesting example in pre-20th century literature of the uncanny (and the liminal as well?): the novel Monsieur Venus, by Rachilde. Toward the end of her novel, Rachilde has her protagonist create a wax dummy of her dead ex-lover, complete his actual hair and teeth, and "programs" it to respond to her kisses. Interestingly, she also plays with the gender of the wax figure so it oscillates between man and woman.
  • based on Freud's definition, we can imagine a spectrum between the strange and the familiar, and the strange and the alien (completely not-us). Imagine we have a knob that can move us from the alien to the most uncanny — perhaps our doppelgänger. This knob might be fun to "turn" as we explore making uncanny art.

History of the Uncanny Valley

"Do they look creepy because they look almost human, or because they look like creepy humans?" - The Uncanny Valley Is Wrong

"The Uncanny Valley" by Masahiro Mori

Watch: Hayao Miyazaki on AI

• "One might say that the prosthetic hand has achieved a degree of resemblance to the human form, perhaps on a par with false teeth. However, when we realize the hand, which at first site looked real, is in fact artificial, we experience an eerie sensation. For example, we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny."

• "When the speed [of the smile] is cut in half in an attempt to make the robot bring up a smile more slowly, instead of looking happy, its expression turns creepy. This shows how, because of a variation in movement, something that has come to appear very close to human—like a robot, puppet, or prosthetic hand—could easily tumble down into the uncanny valley."

• "...when we die, we are, of course, unable to move; the body goes cold, and the face becomes pale. Therefore, our death can be regarded as a movement from the second peak (moving) to the bottom of the uncanny valley.

  I think this descent explains the secret lying deep beneath the uncanny valley. Why were we equipped with this eerie sensation? Is it essential for human beings? I have not yet considered these questions deeply, but I have no doubt it is an integral part of our instinct for self-preservation."

• This paper is not backed by any studies, it is simply the observations of one man exploring his emotional response to the innovation of prosthetics.

"The uncanny advantage of using androids in cognitive and social science research" by Karl F. MacDorman and Hiroshi Ishiguro

Watch: Creation of the Monsters in Silent Hill 2

• "...the more humanlike the robot, the more human-directed (largely subconscious) expectations are elicited. The fact that androids are often incapable of satisfying these expectations may be one reason why we perceive them to be not fully alive."
• There's a section about beauty and the uncanny valley, which I will skip talking about due to its problematic nature.
• " One hypothesis is that an uncanny robot elicits an innate fear of death and culturally-supported defenses for coping with death’s inevitability...It is easy to see in the following examples how partially disassembled androids could play on subconscious fears of reduction, replacement, and annihilation:
  • (1) A mechanism with a human facade and a mechanical interior plays on our subconscious fear that we are all just soulless machines.
  • (2) Androids in various states of mutilation, decapitation, or disassembly are reminiscent of a battlefield after a conflict and, as such, serve as a reminder of our mortality.
  • (3) Since most androids are copies of actual people, they are Doppelgaenger and may elicit a fear of being replaced, on the job, in a relationship, and so on.
  • (4) The jerkiness of an android’s movements could be unsettling because it elicits a fear of losing bodily control.