A recent conversation got me thinking again about whether uncanny UIs could help us to “see the face” of the divine technologies (powerful, pervasive, mysterious) that usually invisible conduits for other things like social media posts and shopping. The paradigm example is the Déjà vu scene of a glitch in The Matrix (which inspired r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix).
G.S. pointed out how an unexpected event, like a plane being rerouted due to bad weather, can reveal new angles on an experience, such as falling into conversation with the passenger next to you and finding something in common. C.R. noted that a change of context, like being an American overseas, could make something familiar (being American in America) become interesting.
Heidegger
We had been discussing Heidegger’s essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” (pdf), and terms he introduced in Being and Time (scan) seem relevant here. Readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) describes an immediate and direct way of interacting with the world. We use a ready-to-hand object without consciously thinking about it, for example when we use a hammer to drive in a nail. Our attention is on the task, not the tool. If we were to take a detached or theoretical view, considering the hammer’s design or its weight, it would exhibit presentness-at-hand (Vorhandenheit).
When something breaks, it’s no longer ready-to-hand. We suddenly become aware of it in a new way. It’s not fully present-at-hand, though; Heidegger uses the term unreadiness-to-hand. (Wikipedia: Ready-to-hand, Present-at-hand.) Heidegger maintains that our perception and understanding of objects depends on our relationship to them, especially our interaction with them.
Therefore, breaking an object—or a system, like a user interface or an online service—makes us conscious of it in an unaccustomed way. A system that’s broken in some way becomes unready-to-hand, and through this, may become present-at-hand, that is, more accessible to a more detached analysis.
UI Design
User interface manipulations are an easy place to start an investigation. There are several collections of infuriating UI designs, such as a collection of 59 Hilariously Infuriating Examples Of User Interface That Even Satan Himself Couldn’t Come Up With. Many are educational, such as 10 painful UI fails (and what you can learn from them) and the site https://theuserisdrunk.com/, a collection of bad UI design examples with the tagline, “Your website should be so simple, a drunk person could use it.”
Some designers created purposefully challenging interfaces to make a point about UI and UX design. For example, User Inyerface [sic] by Bagaar makes it makes it intentionally difficult for visitors to complete tasks (Jeff Ramos gives a tour). The ZXX Font by Sang Mun, designed to be unreadable by OCR algorithms (discussion by Graham Cluley).
Ben Grosser's Facebook Demetricator is a browser extension that removes all the numbers from the Facebook interface (2012 demo video on Vimeo). The stated aim is “to disrupt the prescribed sociality these metrics produce, enabling a network society that isn’t dependent on quantification.” This kind of work straddles design and art.
Uncanny Digital Art
The “traditional” gallery art of Duane Hanson and Ron Mueck set a very high bar for uncanny art.
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| Duane Hanson, Slab Man, 1974–75 |
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| Ron Mueck, Untitled (Big Man), 2000 |
According to its YouTube description, Digital TV Dinner is a video art clip from 1979 created by Raul Zaritsky, Jamie Fenton, and Dick Ainsworth using the Bally Astrocade console game to generate unusual patterns.”
JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) started exploring Internet art in 1994. The https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/ home page presents a seemingly incomprehensible wall of text and code. SOD is “a modification of the game Wolfenstein. You can actually attempt to play the game, but everything is scrampled [sic].”
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| https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/ |
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| https://sod.jodi.org/ |
Around 2004, Thomas Ruff produced a series of monumental images based on internet jpegs. According to MoMA, this work “calls attention to the ways digital images are constructed, circulated, and viewed today.” (See also MoMA video.)
Rosa Menkman (Wikipedia; home page) was an exponent of “glitch art.” A statement from the Glitch Studies Manifesto cited by a Rhizome editorial underlines the way in which glitch can help an audience become aware of conventions that are usually taken for granted:
“...the spectator is forced to acknowledge that the use of the computer is based on a genealogy of conventions, while in reality the computer is a machine that can be bent or used in many different ways. With the creation of breaks within politics and social and economical conventions, the audience may become aware of the preprogrammed patterns.”
In an essay about "AI in Art: Discovering Beauty in the Uncanny," Cezary Gesikowski cites a short film, Thank You For Not Answering by Paul Trillo, that “showcases the beauty of imperfections and uncanny errors in AI-generated images.” Because the film presents as surreal, however, the uncanniness of the AI images were neutered. A lesson, I think, is that it helps if creepiness is unexpected.
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| Still from Thank You For Not Answering by Paul Trillo |
The Uncanny
I've encountered surprisingly disquieting online experiences of something hidden being revealed. The exception that proves the rule is the creepy sense of being followed around by ads from one web site to another after showing an interest in a product somewhere.
Overall, social media experiences, such as when a service’s algorithm rapidly leans my taste and starts tailoring the feed to my taste, feel less uncanny than they should. That’s probably because online services want us to remain immersed in their experience and work hard to avoid jarring moments when the curtain is suddenly pulled aside.
It’s easy to imagine uncanny interventions, though. (By the “If I can think of something, it’s already been done” Rule, they presumably already exist.)
Autocorrect could start to develop a personality or motivations and try to make me say things that it intends but I don’t. (Cf. Elle Cordova’s “Live/hate relationship with Autocorrect” on Instagram.)
It would also be uncanny—but probably only briefly, see my Any sufficiently adopted technology loses its magic—if chatbots started remembering my interests across sessions, saying things like, “You were asking about X a week ago; here’s a connection from X to your current interest in Y.”
If we started wearing AR glasses, it would be disconcerting to see swarms of social media snippets hovering over people as they sit on the bus scanning their phone. (The content would have to be invented, since the data is only available to the social media platforms themselves.)
One could build more visible browser widgets that show how many sites are accessing one’s information as you browse from one web page to another. There are many such tools (Privacy Badger, Brave Shields, more) but their interfaces are usually discreet. I imagine a version where the widget unexpectedly overlays tracking information from time to time.
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