The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture

The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture. Bruce Greenville, editor. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, and Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002.

Reviewed by Christopher Bolton, "The Illustrated Posthuman." Science Fiction Studies #90 = 30.2 (July 2003): 308-10, our source for this entry.

Catalog for an art exhibit that exhibited and juxtaposed in one space "a wide range of art that invokes mechanical or mechanized bodies, from Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographic studies of animal locomotion to work by contemporary Japanese visual artists such as Takashi Murakami and Mariko Mori [...]" (Bolton p. 308). The catalog includes "over sixty photographs, many in color [...]. The art covers a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, film and video, performance art, and industrial design" (Bolton 309).

There are also essays, including Grenville's preface, which "traces the cyborg through several historical moments" (Bolton p. 308), and reprints of essays relevant for the Uncanny and/or cyborgs. One essay that may be difficult to obtain elsewhere is Bruno Bettelheim's 1959 Scientific American article, "Joey: 'A Mechanical Boy.'" on "a child psychotherapy patient who believed himself to be a machine" (Bolton, p. 309 [our supplying fuller citation]). Also of use, an essay by: Toshiya Ueno [...] one of the most important and interesting academic critics writing on visual sf in Japan today [...]. The essay reprinted here, “Japanimation and Techno-Orientalism,” is a 1996 formulation of Ueno’s influential notion of Techno-Orientalism, adapted from David Morley and Kevin Robins: not only is Japan a screen on which the West has projected its technological fantasies, but Japan itself has internalized these characterizations and now projects an image of itself that conforms with the same stereotypes. (Bolton 310).

Note that Bolton's review as such is worth reading for his own comments on the Uncanny (Freudian and otherwise) and cyborgs (p. 309)

RDE, Initial Compiler, 17July19