TOWARDS A CONTEMPORARY UNCANNY: UNDERSTANDING THE UNCANNY WITH AND WITHOUT SUBVERSION, AND FINDING ITS CONTEMPORARY EXPRESSION IN MEDIA �S RE-PRESENTATION OF ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to examine the concept of the uncanny and its relation to architecture in the contemporary situation. Starting with Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, it can be understood as the moment when the familiar turns unfamiliar. Drawing on the anthropomorphic metaphor of architecture, Vidler identifies an architectural uncanny hinging on subverting that body. Comaroff and Ong differentiate horror in architecture from the uncanny – where the former is unsettling the latter is literal, discomforting shock. In visual art, characteristics of media subvert and re-present. But there is an uncanny that does not depend on subversion of an objective subject. Through Eliasson’s and Escher’s works, this dissertation studies the uncanny phenomena from subverting expectations. Both horror and the uncanny are reflective of changing modes of production and consumption. As technology changes, these become new, strange, and uncanny modes of seeing and experiencing. For example, visual and temporal characteristics of film and anime defamiliarises through their re-presentation. Our present moment can be characterised by heterogeneity and Deleuze’s ‘compossibles’ – the combination of possibilities as the only solution in a particular situation. With this constant difference, we are surrounded by perpetual unfamiliarity; no familiar can be recognised thus no uncanny arises. However through fiction, ‘compossibility’s’ absurdity is pushed to extremes without rupturing into horror. ‘No-good architecture’ also evinces extreme ‘compossibility’. But even this is not strange unless distilled through annotated drawings. Thus the uncanny can only be perceived through media’s re-presentation.