Digital Uncanny
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Reviews and Awards
"In this consequential contribution to debates on the posthuman condition, Ravetto-Biagioli presents new and originals perspectives on both contemporary critical theory and recent interactive art to investigate a new body of affects, the computational uncanny, wherein the distinction between machinic and human thought processes are becoming undecidable." --D. N. Rodowick, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in the College and the Division of Humanities at the University of Chicago
"Digital Uncanny brilliantly argues that digital technology provokes anxiety in humans, not because it is too life-like or just a little off (the so-called uncanny valley), but rather because it reveals that we humans are too machine-like. If our responses can be easily predicted and molded, what are we? Do we even own our own actions or emotions? Moving from the artworks of Lozano-Hemmer to popular films such as A.I., Ravetto outlines how the digital uncanny works and pinpoints resistance to surveillance technologies in our risky proliferation of responses and archives." --Wendy Chun, Brown University
"In the digital age everything needs to be updated, and Ravetto-Biagioli tells us how. What we used to fear should no longer scare us, what we used to deem paranoid is now reasonable, and even our most cherished memories are no longer safe. Digital Uncanny reveals how new techno-psycho assemblages have cut much deeper than Freud, Lacan, and Kittler ever imagined. By revealing previously undisclosed connections between the histories of art, technology and psychoanalysis, Ravetto-Biagioli offers a new testament to how the most natural has become the most uncanny." --Jimena Canales, author of The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate that Changes Our Understanding of Time and The Tenth of a Second: A History