Description

Uncanny Valleys was a special summer screening of new and recent video works by young artists exploring the formal, conceptual, and critical possibilities that emerge from interaction with unfaithful simulations, imperfect replication, and the slightly wrong. On a graph plotting emotional response to human likeness, the "uncanny valley" is a region of profound visceral unease elicited by simulated human features that look, move, or behave in ways that are almost, but not quite, natural. Uncanny Valleys featured videos that deploy inauthentic likenesses of human beings or deliberately skewed or bootleg versions of fictional characters, as well as inexact or differential copies of images, objects, and places. Casting a wide net with this metaphor, the videos in the screening program ask questions about how flawed proxies can be deployed for formal experimentation or social, economic, and political critique.

The program included works by artists Oliver Laric, Liz Magic Laser, Ilya Lipkin & Joen Vedel, Takeshi Murata, Rachel Rose, Georgia Sagri, Shanzhai Biennial, Pilvi Takala, and Stewart Uoo.