The Uncanny Valley and Posthumanism By Connie Wilson

“The Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed something interesting: The more

humanlike his robots became, the more people were attracted to them, but only up to a

point. If an android became too realistic and lifelike, suddenly people were repelled and

disgusted… Our warm feelings, which had been rising the more vivid the robot

became, abruptly plunge downward. Mori called this plunge ‘the Uncanny Valley,’ the

paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it’s bad.”

- An excerpt from Clive Thompson’s 1978 article “Why Realistic Graphics Make Humans Creepy”

Though, originally, Mori only intended his theory to apply to robotics, the same insight can be applied to

animation, visual art, and, as I’d like to argue: human culture and human nature as a whole.

Let’s start by taking a look at the picture below, a portrait of several scarecrows.

I don’t know about you but this gives me the creeps. There’s something deeply disturbing about these

human effigies. But what is it? Their forms are so close to human and the details and features are realistic,

but there is certain stiffness about them. The hands are rigid and flexed, their shoulders hunched and elbows

straight, as though stuck in rigor mortis. The facial features are slightly off, too: eyes vacantly staring, skin taut

and stretched, stuck in exaggerated expression. It’s like staring at a dead body posed in an upright position

masquerading as a living being. Haunting, right? If this eerie effect is spurred because a figure is so close to

human, but not quite, then can a human himself alter his own likeness to something barely human at all and

achieve the same uncanny disposition? I say yes: he can.

The term for such a barely human? Posthuman. A posthuman is a being "whose basic capacities so

radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer clearly human by our current standards." (As

described by World Transhumanist Association, circa 2009.) And a transhuman is the halfway point between

posthuman and human. These are often perceived as hypothetical future humanoids seen only in the likes of

science fiction and futurology, but I think posthumans and transhumans have been around since the dawn of

human culture.

This picture of a clown (Cindy Sherman, self portrait, circa 2003), for example, can be defined as a

posthuman. It is humanoid- eyes, hair, mouth, nose, jaw, chin- but it is also vastly inhuman. The hair is

multicoloured, the skin is painted to exaggerate certain features: red nose, blackened under eyes, red mouth,

detailed buck teethed lips, and vertical red streaks that bisect the eyes like bleeding gashes. The effect is

concurrently frightening and goofy.

But the idea of twisting the human form into something barely recognizable has been around for

centuries. A famous example is Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Grotesques’. After studying human anatomy for years,

Leonardo’s pursuit of beauty in form led him to drawing gruesome, exaggerated doodles of deformity. He took

human features and distorted them into bulbous, giant shapes. He stretched noses and chins to triple their

length, deepened wrinkles and frowns to the point of ridiculousness; making his characters look like freaks of

nature to some and hilarious caricatures to others.

Post and trans humanism goes back further still. Ancient Greek theatre is known for it’s very two-

dimensional characters, who bore masks quite like Leonardo’s grotesques, and who portrayed flat, stylized

versions of human emotions: happy, sad, mad- when, in reality, human emotions are anything but clear

and stylized, but rather very complicated and hard to define. In most aspects, the stylization of human

emotion is very easy to accept, we do it every day when we watch movies and television shows, but there

comes a point where the stylization becomes so stiff and robotic that it’s laughable (take the average

daytime soap opera), and a point where the stylization is barely there at all and though it may be funny it

can make the viewer feel extremely uncomfortable (take ‘The Office’). This fits into the idea of a reverse, or

second, Uncanny Valley. The familiarity we have with dramatizations grows and grows as the likeness to

real humans gets truer and truer until a point where it feels almost completely real, but for a slight surrealist

twist. It’s so close that all the slight quirks and oddities stand out and seem so apparent and forced.

One could argue that all actors, clowns and performers are posthumans, in a sense. They put on a sort of

mask and become a simulation of a human being. They are no longer human, but a representation of human,

an extended or degraded stylization. And, depending on the severity of the stylization, we react to it with

attraction or repulsion, like a second Uncanny Valley.

Why is it then that we feel such repulsion when something is 99% human, and such attraction when it is

only 50%? Why does that missing 1% trigger such disgust? Perhaps it is just your spidey senses tingling, or

perhaps it goes back to basic survival instincts. Say you are a healthy cave man living in a tribe and come

across a fellow tribe mate with smallpox. You immediately sense that there is something wrong with this guy

and the sight of him repulses you. You, being the smart caveman you are, decide to avoid the infected tribe

mate and instead talk to ones that look less, uh, pustular. This poor smallpox victim is also a victim of the

Uncanny Valley. He is 99% normal human and 1% spotty disease ridden thing.

The Uncanny Valley may have started as a theory on why realistic robots and graphics make humans

creepy, but it really can be applied to so many other facets of human culture. So, next time you’re feeling

queasy watching a gory horror flick, or cringe at an episode of The Office, you’ll know it’s all thanks to our

friend, The Uncanny Valley.