recent thought / activity
See the full list at LibraryThing
audio
|
uncanny valley I'm giving some thought to reprising my "horror"-themed Composition syllabus next semester, and I know for a fact that I'll be doing a guest lecture on Shaun of the Dead... somehow I can see myself drawing a version of this up on the board: (From the Wikipedia article on the Uncanny Valley, apparently a phenomenon debated among roboticists and CGI dorks.) It'll be a hell of a lot easier to teach the uncanny with this diagram than it will be to attempt to teach the Freud essay from which the term derives: although the Freud is interesting and historically important, it spends a lot of time developing a read of an E. T. A. Hoffmann story from 1816 ("Der Sandmann"), which is not exactly a cultural reference that most eighteen-year-olds have at the ready. (Interestingly, neither the Uncanny Valley page nor the E. T. A. Hoffmann page in Wikipedia contains mention of Freud, and the Freud page doesn't contain mention of Freud's theory of the uncanny. A rare Wikipedia blind spot?) Thanks to Angela.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
| |||||||||||
|