Uncanny Valley

💥✍I have always liked the term "Uncanny Valley" due to the image it projects in the landscape of a V with slopes too slippy & steep to climb & too acute at the join where a community is found heaped on top of one another. Especially now. Paddy's Day night I found myself between The Twilight Zone (TZ) & the Taoiseach's TV Address. The "go green" buildings took on an association best described by my wife as "Mars Attacks" which we watched with the kids the other day with new intensity. Chris O'Dowd (CO'D) from the IT Crowd & Roscommon, stars in the last & probably worst episode of the rebooted TZ on the Sci-Fi Channel. The day had started out Uncanny (see previous COVID-19 Art Chronicle) with Paddy's Day cancelled which led me to Freud's paper 'The Uncanny' from 1919 (numerical repetition like "1919" is a sign we are entering the outer regions of The Uncanny, although we are not exactly in The Uncanny). CO'D plays JEFF, an anthropology professor with a full Irish accent who just witnessed his hippie dad shoot himself with a golden gun with blue scorpion on its white hilt which, we discover later, is a gun that "finds you" & is connected to Chez Guervara. Later JEFF finds a Lynchian love heart case that held his dad's gun & a bullet inscribed with the name JEFF. Was this bullet for JEFF? Did the gun find his dad the same way? Was this the start of the endgame? Then the name JEFF takes on a new life in the following interactions: when JEFF tries to sell the gun to someone named JEFF; when JEFF's estranged wife hires a divorce lawyer named JEFF; when in an attempted mugging JEFF shoots a burglar named JEFF. This is what Freud terms *involuntary return* or *involuntary repetition* in The Uncanny. However the use of "uncanny" around, let's say, twins, is not in Freud's Valley. "Uncanny Valley" is also an hypothesis by Masahiro Mori (1970) that predicts that "an entity (robot) appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers". Enter Leo Varadkar: "This is the calm before the storm, before the surge… The Government is now moving to put in place systems to ensure that elderly people who are asked to *cocoon* will have access to food and supplies"👽

MARCH 19, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night