Uncanny Valley

This is going around these days as the creepiest example of the "uncanny valley"--the idea that, as they approach real lifelikeness, robotic simulations actually get more unpleasant and weirder.

Ed The Happy Clown - Excerpt #3

Ed The Happy Clown - Excerpt #2

Something for us all to consider as we write our papers.....

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

The Comic O'Connor

Following Michael's post, I thought I'd post some fan-generated comic book art for Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" — truly an uncanny tale.

Click here to view large.

O'Connor herself made linocut comics throughout her high school and college career. Here's one of them that's appropriate for this blog:

Ed The Happy Clown - Excerpt

My presentation on underground comics and the uncanny will focus mainly on Chester Brown's award-winning feminist-hated series, Ed The Happy Clown. Brown, inspired after reading The Age of Surrealism, used the concept of spontaneous creation to make an unscripted, stream of consciousness series surrounding a child-like clown who is subjected to one horror after another.

I will be posting excerpts on here to help get everyone familiar with the series; I think it will help promote some interesting discussion.

I always feel like somebody's watching me.

After weeks of covering the idea of the Uncanny, I have found that as varied as the definition is for each individual viewer, my personal views on the Uncanny as well vary from instance to instance. For example, the series of movies titled Paranormal Activity are very widely considered laughable by the regular horror/ghost cinema fanatics, but from a personal standpoint, I have rarely been as afraid throughout the duration of a movie viewing. Yet, while watching many other ghost movies, I find myself giggling about the nonsensical nature of the films. I think my personal definition of the Uncanny would be best exemplified by that which is not seen and cannot be explained. When a film or story leaves trace of the ghost or creature actually being something tangible and more real, I am not given the full uncanny effect. In such movies as Paranormal Activity, where the demon inhabiting the house is never shown (once in a book of demonology, but never in actuality) I am given more of the uncanny experience than almost anything else. I know, its seems to be an umbrella term to describe my personal experience of the Uncanny as things that I cannot comprehend, but generally this fact can only be applied to cinema. When it comes to the actual world, it becomes incredibly hard to describe my personal definition of what I find Uncanny. Most often I would say it stems from the entirely unsettling feeling of thinking I am being watched or followed, or in shadows cast that I cannot find a form to match. Although we have gone over many, many theories surrounding and regarding the definition, I find myself continuously going back to the definitions that we began with, such as uncanny as the absence of god or explanation, or the uncanny as something I have not yet come to terms or defined for myself. It is the the inexplicable that I find the strongest sense of the uncanny, which I also find mildly ironic as I am unable to explain the term either.