Search results for "Uncanny"
showing 7 items of 7 documents
Dubai: a city as a capriccio
2019
Dubai is a fascinating young city projected to the future. Its skyline offers nowadays a wide panorama of architectural works, from hi-scale landscape interventions to small size projects, designed by some of the most renowned world-famous architects. Those projects aim at a radical change of the urban landscape, attempting to reconnect a built environment today fragmented by the bursting expansion of recent times. The Essay talk about the proper perception of a peculiar “collage city” like Dubai, in an analogous but inverted manner in the rapport between reality and representation, generate an idea of city that puts the visitor in a condition of surreal estrangement, where any kind of juxt…
Conventional Theory’s Relevance: Evidence from Japan
2019
Abstract The formidable surge in the volume of international trade after 1960 stimulated surveys designed to ascertain to what degree the commercial flows among nations reflected the structure of their economies, in other words, how tight was the correlation between international exchanges and the specific attributes of participating nations. In fact, scholars were keen to test the relevance of the conventional Heckscher-Ohlin theory, that is, to what extent did nations’ exports reflect their endowment with factors of production, more specifically, whether their exports used their abundant factors intensively. I try to show that, although most of the tests reached their purpose in that they…
Help! Is my Chatbot Falling into the Uncanny Valley? : An Empirical Study of User Experience in Human-Chatbot Interaction
2019
Original article available at http://dx.doi.org/10.17011/ht/urn.201902201607 Advances in artificial intelligence strengthen chatbots’ ability to resemble human conversational agents. For some application areas, it may be tempting not to be transparent regarding a conversational agent’s nature as chatbot or human. However, the uncanny valley theory suggests that such lack in transparency may cause uneasy feelings in the user. In this study, we combined quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate this issue. First, we used a 2 x 2 experimental research design (n = 28) to investigate effects of lack in transparency on the perceived pleasantness of the conversation in addition to percei…
Chasing Shakespeare: The Impurity of the “Not Quite” in Norry Niven’s From Above and Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is My Romeo
2017
The essay situates the “not Shakespeare” of this volume within the theoretical problematics of the “post-textual.” It re-elaborates the “post-textual” as the uncanny re-appearance of Shakespeare in the form of heterogeneous fragments that are made to cohabit with various textual and media environments. These media products include a “Shakespeare” that is not quite Shakespeare, an “entity” that becomes the site of unceasing transactions (for instance, between an “outside” and an “inside,” between visibility and invisibility, between the “original” and its iteration) and multiple contaminations (through media, characters, and plays).
“This England”: Re-Visiting Shakespearean Landscapes and Mediascapes in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010)
2017
The paper will offer a reading of John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010), a 90-minute experimental feature film that has been defined as “one of the most vital and original artistic responses to the subject of immigration that British cinema has ever produced” (Mitchell). It will focus on the multifarious ways in which the film makes the “canonical” literary material that it incorporates, including Shakespeare, interact with rarely seen archival material from the BBC regarding the experience of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It will argue that through this interaction the familiarity of Western “canonical” literature re-presents itself as an uncanny landscap…
Kashubian Lake Calling
2020
This study leads the reader to some remote Kashubian villages, located on the shores of Lake Słupino, Poland. The residents of these villages have witnessed uncanny transformations of their once familiar lake in recent years. Through changes in color, odor and matter, Słupino has obtruded itself to call out the problem of pollution. How does the lake express itself? How does it affect the everyday life of the inhabitants? To approach the specific interaction between the lake and the inhabitants (thus non-human and human), the author conducted sensory ethnography and conversed with residents affected by the problem. The categories call, care and Stimmung are used to analyze the gathered empi…
The Feminine Monster. The Uncanny and the Construction of Motherness in Furtivos
2018
The maternal figure embodies one of the most recurrent metaphors in Spanish cinema of late-Francoism and transi-tion, a metaphor that has been read as a device of social criticism towards the dictatorship. Largely due to the sym-bolic connotations that the Franco regime had projected on motherhood, it has been connected with the dictatorial past, functioning on the screen as a monstrous and uncanny personification of the Francoist repressive apparatus. Thus the maternal has become a privileged space for the deployment of film narratives that explore how power rela-tions within the family can be portrayed as a symbol of the relationship between the subject and the State. This arti-cle deals …