Surrealism/The Uncanny Valley

Today's lecture was about Surrealism and the Uncanny Valley. I knew what surrealism is but I had no clue what uncanny was. I thought this lecture was very interesting and found these styles quite daring.

Surrealism - a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism

Uncanny - strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny

https://www.wikiart.org/en/salvador-dali/the-persistence-of-memory-1931

Salvador Dali is one of the greatest surrealist artists and this piece of work is from 1931 called The Persistence of Memory. I like how you get a sense of place within this painting. There's the presence of location and the clocks makes it feel unusual considering the location looks nice. I like how the clocks look like they've melting and it just makes the viewer think more theoretically about what it's suggesting. To me, it means that time is priceless and we're only left with a memory which ironically can be forgotten over time.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/91/be/6f/91be6f8907ca00357eb7bde8024892b7.jpg

In comparison, we have an example of uncanny. Uncanny comes from the word 'unhomely' This is an image from Stanley Kubrick's movie "The Shining, 1980". This image of twins becomes strange in an unsettling place because it's unusual seeing twins dressed and looking slightly creepy, in an old fashioned building. I think the location does help with the strangeness because it gives it some context. It reminds me of creepy kids from a mental asylum. Bringing this back to the comparison, you can immediately see the difference between surrealism and uncanny. Surrealism doesn't have to be scary in simple forms, it can just be abstract but uncanny is more lenient towards the creepy side.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Mori_Uncanny_Valley.svg/450px-Mori_Uncanny_Valley.svg.png

Here is a diagram that shows the level of human familiarity and where things become uncanny. This diagram is called The Uncanny Valley, 1970. It suggests what we're used to seeing and what we may find interesting.

This has been one of my favourite lectures because I enjoyed the theory side to uncanny and seeing various examples of creepy images. It also helps me wonder that I'd use some of these techniques and theory in my own work to create designs that people would find interesting the same way we'd react to seeing a zombie.