We’ve always had our suspicions about David Byrne, but it just makes us love him more.

David Byrne has teamed up with our pals Hanson Robotics to make Julio, a singing head and shoulders bot. Julio is haunting, yet oddly compelling.

David Byrne also has a few choice things to say on Julio and robotics in general, and one of my favorite subjects, The Uncanny Valley:

Part of the enjoyment of seeing the various robots at Nextfest was experiencing a taste of the uncanny. The idea of the uncanny was proposed by Ernst Jentsch in 1906. He refers to the uncanny as something uncertain or undecidable which therefore makes us uncomfortable. [Freud disagreed—or elaborated on this]. He calls it un-heimlich, the un-home-like. His idea is that our psychological concept of home implies familiarity and comfort, a sense of ease, and, according to him, any concept we hold also implies the existence of its polar opposite—the un-home-like, the unusual, the unknown, the strange.

I love where this is going. It brings to mind an image of someone sitting in a comfortable chair, maybe with friends, and maybe they’re having drinks—and at the same time Jentsch posits that layered over or under this image is the profoundly creepy, the deeply strange and disturbing. We’re in the land of David Lynch and Hitchcock. ET landing in the familiar U.S. suburbs could be viewed this way, or the various living dead and vampire movies.

More recently Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed the existence of something called the uncanny valley. This “valley” is an area of emotional uncertainty and often revulsion experienced by an observer when a robot or computer animation (for example) approaches being human, is almost believable, but not quite.

He suggests that our emotional empathy with animations and robots increases as they get closer and closer to being human (or animal)—but then, at a certain point, they fall into the valley, and our empathy turns to disgust. In his view they switch from being a cute thing approaching humanity to a bad or faulty version of humanity. It is at this point that we see them as not merely slightly strange, but as a human with serious problems. If the creation can succeed in being a little bit better as a believable creature the feeling of revulsion disappears. For some viewers, recent films like Beowulf fall into this valley, while others find the almost humans acceptable.

This is especially relevant to us over here lately, since we are in the process of moving out of the RoBunker and into the quality (if slightly unnerving) digs of Uncanny Valley, just outside of San Francisco. We’ll let you know if it makes visitors sick or just slightly weirded out.

[David Byrne links and stuff courtesy those fine dorks over at Metafilter]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Bill Joy Might Be Right, Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.