Entering into the world of Second Life is an unnerving experience. Fantastical anthropoid forms dart around the screen, flying, gyrating and whizzing along every axis. Avatars radically alter their appearance, cast spells and interact with whimsical virtual objects. But the world of Second Life is not unnerving for how different it is from traditional human reality. It is unnerving in its refracted similarity. Second Life is an unnerving universe of the uncanny.
Freud’s Uncanny: So Similar It’s Scary
If we gloss over the omnipresent digressions on castration, Freud has some very useful insights into the phenomenon known as “the uncanny” (referred to as unheimlich which translates as “unhomely,” or more precisely, “anti-homely”) of particular relevance to Second Life. Freud explains that “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (220). It is not merely a fear of the new or unknown that lies at the heart of uncanniness for Freud, but rather that precarious point of friction where the impostor seems to spill into the uncertain edges of the real.
Second Life becomes uncanny when virtual presence draws attention to long-standing, but otherwise unidentified undercurrents of physical human reality. I become confused as to what my avatar should look like if it doesn’t look like my mostly unchosen physical body. Relationships and social convention become instinctually reinscribed in virtual spaces. Strangers are met with slight apprehension and friends are preferred for interaction. I become lonely when I am in an unpopulated virtual space and ponder “what’s the point of being here?” For all its virtual agency, Second Life is a vortex of profound existential angst. And there is pleasure to be derived from addressing and playing with our veiled preconceptions and imposed, implicit boundaries of reality in the mutable realm of the virtual.
Simulacra, Automata and Pleasure
In his article on “Dionysiac Machines,” Seth Giddings connects this idea of the uncanny to the pleasures of automata and virtual humans. Copies, simulacra and automata become interesting when they tread closely on the innately familiar, but not too close. Giddings notes that “if the audience is fooled into thinking that they are seeing the original then the simulacrum has failed” (427), and I feel the chart I have constructed below explains the boundaries of pleasurable simulacra:
REAL FAKE
REAL
FAKE
The avatar in Second Life becomes an Uncanny double when it reminds us too much of our physical selves. Second Life presents a virtual environment far too unrealistic and fantastical to suggest any sort of visual confusion between the real and the simulated, but the opportunities for virtual behavior and interaction present many potentially unnerving scenarios. It is the moments of unease when we realize our virtual manifestations have stumbled upon something very non-virtual.
I share Giddings’ excitement that “we should also be alive to the sheer strangeness [sic], the monstrosity, of the virtual worlds, their entities, and the actual worlds and entities (including players) they generate.” We are given an electric world of the uncanny in which we may catch a sideways reflection of the strangeness of the material world. Except with brighter costumes and more dance moves.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture, Ed. Bruce Grenville. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001.
Giddings, Seth. “Dionysiac Machines: Videogames and the Triumph of the Simulacra.” Convergence 13.4. 2007. 417 – 431
What’s the difference between the uncanny and the absurd? The uncanny is brought on by fear, the absurd by confusion, or perhaps the nonrecognition. Both imply a sense of incomprehension.
If the uncanny leads us back to the familiar perhaps the absurd takes us to something completely unfamiliar, and as we become accustomed that thing loses its absurdity.
Artist David Robbins created a term I like called ‘concrete comedy’. “Concrete comedy”, he writes “proposes that what had previously appeared to be two traditions, one called “art,” the other “entertainment,” is actually a single impulse–comedy–tailored to the conditions of two specific worldly contexts. Works in this tradition share a unified, consistent structural life, constituting a single history that offers at once an alternative to conventional comedic practice and an alternative reading of recurrent visual-art strategies.”
The kind of comedy he is interested in emphasizes the idea of doing something funny over saying something funny. Thus performance becomes a key strategy. However, he also sights sculpture artists, video, even painting. Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture works (or 3D cartoons, as Robbins calls them) are hilarious. Imagine entering a room to find Pope John Paul struck by a meteor and the glass from the ceiling broken.
I think one of the interesting aspects of Second Life is the ability to venture beyond the uncanny and into the absurd. When I say absurd, I don’t necessarily mean funny, but that is a potential outcome. Second Life, of course, offers more potential to create absurdist things, actions, etc. because it is not confined by biology etc. For example, I saw an avatar that was a giant.
However, once we become accustomed to the absurd aspects of Second Life, they become familiar, but do they also produce new relationships to objects, spaces, images, social situations, that may in fact impact our first life? If, after all, doing is funnier than saying, then perhaps we need to bring some of the absurdist aspects of Second Life back in to reality and do them here.
What those aspects might be… I’m not sure. But if it was familiar to us in Second Life, and then brought back to reality…I wonder, would that produce an uncanny effect?
_ _ _
work cited
Robbins, David. (2004). “Concrete Comedy”. Art Forum. November.
You raise a very interesting question Rob and I’ll give you my best guess.
The absurd achieves its effect through an excess of difference.
An event/object/situation/performance must exceed expectation by a sufficient distance to encounter the absurd. It must defy conventional bounds of plausibility and accepted possibility. The absurd must continually push the boundaries of the novel and the unencountered or it risks becoming its opposite: the ordinary. Particular preexisting configurations of social and cultural context are thus vital. If every room were filled with 3D cartoons, it would cease to seem absurd after a short time. Once Second Life blows open our bounds of expectation, suggesting a realm where (mostly) “anything goes,” very little of that world continues to seem absurd.
Conversely, the uncanny achieves its effect through a lack of difference.
Something becomes uncanny when there is disturbingly little difference between what we feel and what we expect to feel. We are caught off guard not by unprecedented novelty (as with the absurd), but because of unanticipated familiarity. Things seem eerily close, but just not quite the same for some strange reason. An android becomes uncanny when it makes us feel almost as if we are interacting with a human, even though we expect to feel like we are interacting with a machine. If the feeling is too similar (i.e. exactly like interacting with a human), it fails to remain an uncanny experience. It moves from the unheimlich to the heimlich.
I don’t think being acclimatized to the new expectational bounds of Second Life will change our relationship to expectations within our first life. As with any game/simulation experience, we innately draw distinctions between the virtual and real worlds as independent realms with unique (but sometimes overlapping) rules and conventions. But we can be provoked to ask questions about our first life maybe. Perhaps we will notice that certain hidden bounds do indeed exist where discrepancies between first and Second Life arise.
I think that it may be possible to derive an uncanny effect from bringing elements of Second Life into reality. I would be a little freaked out if I saw my grotesque little avatar running around talking like me. But on another level, I also feel like the uncanny is something profoundly instinctual, and thus, profoundly bodily, and so these effects may not translate well in reverse.
It’s certainly a worthwhile experiment.
Lovely discussion and lovely original post!
Absurd=inconsistent with reason or logic or common sense (Source: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=absurd)
uncanny=preternatural, uncanny (surpassing the ordinary or normal) “Beyond his preternatural affability there is some acid and some steel” – George Will;
(source: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=uncanny&sub=Search+WordNet&o2=&o0=1&o7=&o5=&o1=1&o6=&o4=&o3=&h=000)
Two completely different frame or references….
I do not understand why you assume uncanny is brought on by fear and absurd confusion….
But I agree that the absurd is an interesting angle to explore… Which I believe you found a way of doing with your physical avatar presentation….
Keep up the dialog…
I can give you an example of an uncanny effect. Communicating more effectively via virtual communication then physical.