c. billadeau

This thing has been making its way around the interwebs, but I just sat down and actually watched the video today and
oh
my
god.

This freaks the ever-loving shit out of me.

As Warren Ellis sez: “charming robot pet, future sex toy for the mentally doomed, or simply the pulsing fodder for tonight’s nightmares?”

“Funktionide” is a kinetic-sculptural-somewhat-commerical artwork by Dutch sorry, German! designer Stefan Ulrich. Set within a futuristic vision, Ulrich imagines a world where humans have lost connection with each other to the point that they turn to these quivering masses of dough for “emotional satisfaction”. Which sounds very Freudian.

A lot of the general public (and even a lot of scientists!) politely dismiss Freudian theory these days as incorrect or, more poetically, as “a load of bollocks”. The guy actually had several brilliant ideas outside of the sexually-loaded theories that everyone is familiar and/or biased against now, such as the underlying structure of the subconscious and how things like defense mechanisms and the phenomenon known as “the uncanny” fit into it all.

I really really really briefly touched on the latter subject in a short, somewhat unfinished paper I wrote about Warren Ellis and the posthuman:

“First defined in 1906 by Ernst Jentsch, the uncanny ‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate’ … . Freud expands upon this definition by adding a more relative branch: ‘the uncanny’ is a sensation of revulsion, despite its familiarity. Cognitive dissonance is often created by the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. What exactly attracts and repels us about something uncanny usually only surfaces on the subconscious level–whether it be a slight flaw in the expression of a robotic face or a clammy look to a prosthetic limb, there is awareness and unawareness, repulsion and attraction.”

And I realize the dread I feel boiling up in me as I watch that …thing sliver up the side of the bed about a minute into the film is a perfect example of the uncanny.

What I do like about Funktionide is the understanding of the transhumanist ideal Ulrich has. In this piece, he is not attempting to hide, mask, or otherwise avoid “the uncanny” like, say, 3D animators must do (and occasionally fail at doing). He has accepted and embraced the feeling of the uncanny as a natural “full human” response to the object and wishes to help us examine this negative reaction.

Jamais Cascio has suggested in this essay that things like Funktionide could be eventually accepted as “alive” and “real” by humans, given more exposure to boundary-blurring elements like prosthetic enhancements and extreme body modification. Soon, this squishy slug thing will appear more and more “acceptable”; the uncanny valley will rise and begin again–in reverse. The idea of what is “alive” and “human” will eventually morph into something completely different from the concept of a human that we understand today. And then the whole uncanny will begin anew with entirely different standards, ones that are impossible to imagine today.

But for now, I guess I still have a long way to go, because Funktionide is going to haunt my dreams for weeks.

Funktionide re-found via Ellis’s blog, incidentally.