“The terms have switched: the machine is a machine, but the human relates to it as if it were

human because it is “personalized”--not in the sense of being turned into a person but rather
matched to the personal preferences of the would-be user. The test is now about the quality of
the relation--the match--between two entities, not about the quality--the intelligence--of the
second entity (whether human or AI)”

Uncanny coined by Freud referring to the return of repressed memories, desires, and
experiences to their anticipation.
● You’re reminding me of my parent but you’re also not quite my parent

Caleb’s feelings programmed into Ava are not from him but based on him.
Reducing subjectivity to data patterns.

Nonhuman devices (surveillance technologies, automata, dolls, avatars, body doubles)

anticipate human gestures, emotions, actions, and interactions, thus intimating that we are
machines and that our behavior may be predictable precisely because we are machinic.

The digital uncanny is a trick we play on ourselves due to sophisticated digital technologies.
It reveals ourselves as patterns rather than causing us to reflect on our place in the world.

Psychoanalytic thinking sees varieties of machinic, automatic, or self-organizing behavior as

insanity or paranoia.

How can we be more productive in looking at our relation to technology?

Digital age, we are conscious of ubiquitous surveillance and mass data collection. “Predictive
analytics, predictive marketing, body-language analysis, and neuromarketing operate to know
that there are automatic processes at work behind our selections and possibly “our” desires.

DO NOT SHARE YOUR DATA lol

Psychoanalytic theory -- irruption of the real

Lacan “Our confrontation with the real is contingent on our failure as subjects--the realization
that identity is always fragmentary and virtual--
---> Back to the freakin’ phallus, but what it means really is the difficulty with embodying the void
(lack, castration, etc.)

I agree that the phallus prejudices psychoanalytic thinking about the uncanny.
The phallus is like reveling in one’s anxiety but it “leaves both the basic cause of repression
obscure, as well as the specific mechanism by which repression produces anxiety.”

This void is an experience that the subject feels. But if we think about humans and technology
as being co-constituted (“our skills, modes of relating, and creating meaning change with the
technologies we develop”) with the introduction of modern media this idea of subject or the
human perspective makes less sense. It becomes less so by realizing the underbelly of the
human mind and its automatic processes but rather an interaction or an ecosystem of
processes where automation and autonomy aren’t so easily distinguishable.

Example of a clear feeling of a subject. You’re reading an author’s work and their words quiver
with sensuality and memory. So, the unconscious? of the author within the novel. A data flow.

But then memories and dreams can be recorded. Repetition of these means “‘[m]achines take
over functions of the central nervous system”

But the point is that they think that these ghostly images and sounds return out of joint (out of
sync, out of rhythm) and this apparently is transgressive... these rhythms aren’t quite right
perhaps.

“They are neither inscribed in the context of their capture nor are they beholden to any
represented foundation. Like the uncanny, they are unstable, capable of infinite possibility of
returns, assemblages, and re-assemblages; they cannot be said to have any inherent meaning.”

The gramophone, telephone, film, and typewriter have their ghostly devices

Memory becomes tertiary (non lived) because the recording is more accurate?

The uncanny is bound up by subjective emotions such as “dread, terror, uneasiness, and
anticipation.”

The uncanny is an affect often triggered by and understood as an aesthetic experience, though
one that points to unrestrained psychic energy and to an uncertain subjectivity and inability to
judge. Intangible emotion.
Films are not interactive and the spectator cannot be installed within the feedback loop
● Perception - we see as the camera sees
● Recognition - we recognize situations and events
● Identification - we identify characters and identify their situation

“In installation and interactive digital art, however, the spectator is not always
interpellated--called on or addressed as subject--but remains within the sensory, within the
aesthetic element.”

Rather than showing us the digital uncanny like in the film Ex Machina, interactive artwork elicits
the sensation of being beside ourselves (not inside?) by exploring our relation to digital
technologies. (Loose paraphrase)

This book focuses on the artwork of

Sue Hawksley - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9oiOE29HA0
And Garth Paine

Interactive but not always immersive works

These artworks aren’t an anchoring point to understand ourselves in relation to the work, but it
allows us to experience new uncanny experiences.

Questions these artworks ask:

-Where does embodiment take place if it inhabits so many screening devices that present it as
virtual and untimely?
-How have information and communication technologies blurred the line between the human
and the technologies that mediate what it means to be human?
-And what is the role of affect when emotions can be predicted, simulated, and controlled?
-Rather than just remediating (doubling and redoubling uncertainties already present in earlier
technologies), the digital uncanny asks us to examine how screening, tracking, and
data-capturing technologies have reconfigured our various experiences (e.g., social
engagement, political activism, knowledge production, tuning in, participation, etc., and with our
understanding of subjectivity, embodiment, and experience.

These interactive works confront users and spectators with whether their responses or images
are their own or programmed by the machines they interact with. Helping us rethink the
uncanny.

Freud: “doubt to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as
to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate.”
But to Freud, the uncanny is not a direct neurological relation to mechanical devices but a
psychologically mediated form of automaticity that is realized as an aesthetic or affect
experience--deja vu, delusions of grandeur, paranoid behaviors those shocking feelings
‘The uncanny is an automatic but also intentional and embodied (though symptomatic) response
to “Something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.’”

The digital uncanny doesn’t focus on the internal feelings (paranoia, dread, etc.) in response to
the uncanny. Instead it is an example of uncertainty to whether those affects and intensities are
preset responses of programmed gestures triggered by the media. Questioning the human-ness
of the human and the machine-ness of the machine.

Realizing that you have programming. But this is no surprise to psychologists like Ruta.

analogue uncanny of the automaton geared to a specific task

VS
the digital uncanny of a robot that uses information gathered by feedback to become adaptable

But analog and digital actually has a slippery difference rather than a clear distinction

I don’t understand that line by Brian Massumi about there being an excess of analog over the
digital (the bottom of page 7)

Human-Machine from Subject-Object to Human-Machine Assemblages

“It is not clear who or what acts, it is also not clear who or what constitutes this notion of ‘self’ in
the self-replicating machine.”

Weizenbaum’s secretary knew ELIZA wasn’t human but still developed a relationship with it.
“Our inability to distinguish ourselves from those networks that measure, record, and analyze
us; stimulate our emotional and intellectual feedback...” And then they can control and engineer
outcomes.

Uncanny challenges subject and object positions and our ability to identify as self.

“Is Ava self-aware or programmed to appear so? Is Nathan self-aware or simply socially
programmed to be self-aware?”

The last paragraph I was too hungry for but I found it very interesting. About lying and
truth-telling. Is there a clear distinction between the two? What is the micro-expression of a lie?
Is it self-reflective judgment or is it some direct expression? Maybe re-read it later.