Uncanny (Inter)Mediality and Photo Futures

Abstract

This article explores how uncanny feelings may derive from ways in which a medium operates, from its mediality. Consistent with the main source of uncanny feelings identified by Ernst Anton Jentsch and later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud, tensions between the inanimate and the animate are at the centre of the exploration. Such tensions, the article proposes, are implicitly or explicitly intermedial. The malleability of photographic imagery boosted by the computational revolution remaking photographic technology and practices allow for ever more forms of hybrid mediality in which intermedial tensions operate. The proliferation of such tensions suggests that we are likely to see more uncanny mediality in the time ahead. Our uncanny future may further be strengthened by the increasingly autonomous operations of machine learning algorithms that in part relocate agency from humans to machines.

Keywords

• uncanny mediality
• medium specificity
• intermediality
• machine learning
• photography
• gif