Showing posts with label uncanny valley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label uncanny valley. Show all posts

20 Aug 2016

We're All Going on a Summer Holiday (Notes on the Photography of Bernard Faucon)

Bernard Faucon: Les Grandes Vacances (1976-81)


Doesn't time fly?

It's now forty years since the scorching hot summer of '76, when French photographer Bernard Faucon first began assembling material for a five-year project that combined the ravishing, short-lived beauty of actual boys, with the rather more unsettling - though equally mythic - beauty of synthetic beings (in this case mannequins) into a queer form of tableau

A project which came to be known as Les Grandes Vacances and that might best be described - borrowing if I may from the clinical language of paraphilia - as a work of paedopygmalionism, although I'm fairly certain that the perverse love of boys, be they real or artificial, isn't really the point of these pictures.

What then, one might ask, is the point of these disconcerting images taken from a summer camp pitched deep in the Uncanny Valley? 

To be honest, I'm not sure I can answer this question. Even Roland Barthes recognised that the puzzle they pose and leave dangling before our eyes - "which cannot look away and yet cannot pierce their mystery" - is a genuine one and thus never fully solvable. 

Ultimately, no photograph, if it's any good, can ever be explained; if we could always articulate what we wanted to say, then no one would bother taking pictures which, far from speaking a thousand words, present an enigmatic, silent, and still form of truth.    

It's interesting to note, however, that Faucon - a philosophy graduate of the Sorbonne who initially worked as a fine art painter - gave up photography in the mid-1990s and began to reinvent himself as a writer, suggesting that the pen remains not only mightier than the sword, but the camera and the paintbrush too.  


See: Roland Barthes, 'Bernard Faucon', in Signs and Images, trans. Chris Carter, (Seagull Books, 2016). 


2 Apr 2016

Vajankle

 The vajankle designed and sold by Sinthetics


The vajankle - as the name suggests - is a sex toy designed for podophiles; a synthetic foot that comes complete with an inbuilt vagina. And a French pedicure. Whilst I'm sure it was developed with good intentions (i.e. to give pleasure), I think it fails for two reasons. 

Firstly, due to its almost-but-not-quite natural appearance it triggers an uncanny valley response (i.e. a feeling of revulsion). Thus the vajankle is aesthetically disturbing; it makes one think of heavy-footed zombies stumbling about or corpses lying in a morgue, rather than bare-footed beauties with dainty feet and lively little toes. 

Doubtless there are necrophiles aroused by the former and by fantasies of mutilation, but most foot fetishists love the vitality and playfulness of pretty feet as they dangle on the end of lovely legs; they wish to kiss and caress the objects of their desire, not chop them off.

Secondly, the vajankle completely misses the point of a fetish for a genuine devotee; it isn't merely a substitute for something else or a type of foreplay before the real event - i.e. genital penetration. Podophiles love feet and have no interest in sexual intercourse as traditionally conceived; they're not looking to ejaculate within a vagina, be it real or otherwise. 

In other words, they subscribe to an entirely different economy of bodies and their pleasures than those who automatically insert their penises where they've been instructed to put them. Foot fetishists, like paraphiliacs in general, want to find new uses for old organs; transforming sex into an exploratory ordeal in which, as Ballard puts it, the body becomes a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities

Placing a fake pussy into a rubber foot is, therefore, a banal and laughably naive gesture; both unimaginative and reactionary. There's nothing depraved or deviant about it. It's an attempt to bring the fetishist back into line by reinforcing the view that nothing is more gratifying or exciting than the membrane of a vagina (an orifice designated as the only legitimate and natural place of orgasm). 

Ultimately, what makes perverts philosophically interesting is the fact that whilst they may want to masturbate at every given opportunity, they also want to build bodies without organs and to have done with the judgement of God ...