Bruno Surace, video of the conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGK55-6wj2I&t=1028s "Transhuman Visages: Artificial Faces in Arts, Science, and Society", Symposium and Meeting of the Senior Advisory Board, PIAST, Polish Institute of Advanced Studies, 28 January 2020

1. 1
Face ex Machina
Demiurgical Faces from the Eye of Hal9000 to
S1m0ne and Ava
Bruno Surace
Warsaw, 27/01/2020

2. 2
Contents
1. From the Unheimliche to the Uncanny Valley
1. Semantic Dimension
2. Syntactic Dimension
3. Pragmatic Dimension
2. How the Semiotic Gaze could implement our
comprehension of the Uncanny Valley
1. Psychological Frame (creepiness vs fascination)
2. Between Enunciation and Enactivism
3. The Semiotic Surplus
3. A Brief Landscape of Uncanny Valley in Cinema and
Media
1. Literature (Der Sandman)
2. Cinema and Animation (A.I. Artificial Intelligence,
S1m0ne, Ex Machina)
3. TV Series (Small Wonder, Westworld, Black Mirror)
4. Conclusion between Social Robotics, Semio-robotics
and Roboethics
1. Mechano-Human Interaction
2. “The Human Face of Robotics”

3. 3
“The concept of “Uncanny” was firstly used in the
article entitled “On The Psychology of The
Uncanny", by Ernst Jentsch, a German psychologist,
in 1906. Jentsch points out that the uncanny arises
from the case of uncertainty, when a person has a
difficulty in making a decision. According to Jentsch,
physical uncertainties can be the causes of the
uncanny. The answers to the questions such as “Are
the objects, which we visually perceive alive, really
alive?” or “Are the objects, which we perceive as
non-living, really non-living?” create a doubt in
mind. The way to overcome this feeling of uncanny
might be to identify the thing which creates the doubt
(Sellars, 2008)”.
Fethi Kaba, Hyper-Realistic Characters and the
Existence of the Uncanny Valley in Animation Films,
2013, p. 188

4. 4
Uncanny
Freud: an attempt to fight the
power of death by achieving
immortality: “The double
reverses its aspect. From
having been an assurance of
immortality, it becomes the
uncanny harbinger of death.”
Otto Rank: the importance of
the doppelgänger
Masahiro Mori, 1970, Bukimi
no Tani Gensho (THE
UNCANNY VALLEY)
Us (Peele 2019)

5. 5

6. 6
Final Fantasy (Sakaguchi e Sakakibara 2001)
“Peter Travers in Rolling Stone wrote, “…but then you notice coldness in
the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements.” (Marisa Book, 2007).
According to Matthew Butler, the film producers fell in the trap of “the
uncanny valley” by using all the technological methods of photo-realistic
animation” (Kaba ib., p. 190)

7. 7
A semiotic phenomenon
David Lewkowicz and Asif Ghazanfar 2012: Uncanny
Valley is not an evolutionary but a developmental
phenomenon (connected with so-called «perceptual
narrowing»: «This process improves the perception of
things that people experience often and causes them to
experience a decline in the ability to perceive some things
to which they are not often exposed» - the ability from
birth of discerning different face types, Pascalis et al.
2002)
Yoshi-Taka Matsuda 2012: uncanny responses in infants
exposed to images of the mother’s face (unaltered or
morphed) and of strangers’ faces, related to perceptual
narrowing
Tinwell 2011, p. 746: «Any observed incongruence alerts
people to oddness and the possibility of unpredictability of
behavior which is alarming (even distressing and scary)
as it may present a potential threat to personal safety.
Hence, the sensation of uncanniness may serve to act as
a sign of unpredictability and danger.»

8. 8
“Kyle Buchanan (2011), of New York Magazine, observed
that, while Tintin appeared likeable and charming, there
was a mismatch between his behavioral fidelity with his
realistic human-like appearance. “Tintin looks
simultaneously too-human and not human at all, his face
weirdly fetal, his eyes glassy and vacant instead of
bursting with animated life.” […] Despite facing perilous
scenarios in the movie, Tintin’s face did not fully
communicate fear, or at least excitement, in response to
these high-drama scenes. As a result, some found him
dull rather than intriguing and were left unconcerned if
Tintin managed to escape from apparent danger or not.
This was the case for John Beifuss (2011), who authored
the article “‘The Adventures of Tintin’—A Review: Steven
Spielberg and the Uncanny Valley of Doom.”” (Tinwell p.
14-15).
The Adventures of Tintin (Spielberg 2011)

9. 9
Pollick 2009
“It can get eerie. As you push further and further, it begins to get
grotesque. You start to feel like you’re puppeteering a corpse”
Polar Express (Zemeckis 2004)

10. 10
Unreal Engine (Epic Games)

11. 11
«a high-fidelity digital replica»

12. 12

13. 13
“Mori’s concept is discussed controversially; it has been considered
non-scientific (Ferber 2003) and questionable (Bartneck 2007) or
served as inspiration (MacDorman 2005). But even if not addressed
explicitly, the Uncanny (Freud 1963) plays a role when it comes to
the design of artificial beings. It serves as a nodal point for the
acceptance and the overall impact of artificial beings, such as
humanoid robots, embodied interface agents, computer game figures
or avatars. Human characters in animation films, for example, are
often considered to fall into the Uncanny Valley when they are
designed to achieve a very realistic appearance.1 Successful
movies, in contrast, tend to employ features that are more cartoon-
like in order to avoid the effect.2 Instead of aiming at a copy of the
real world, an original aesthetic gets created.”
Intermediaries: reflections on virtual humans, gender,
and the Uncanny Valley
Claude Draude, 2011, p. 319

14. 14
Jari Kätsyri, Klaus Förger, Meeri Mäkäräinen, Tapio Takala, A Review of
empirical evidence on different uncanny valley hypotheses: support for
perceptual mismatch as one road to the valley eeriness, 2015, p. 5

15. 15
Kätsyri et al. Ib.

16. 16
Kätsyri et al. Ib.
1. Semantic problems:
• Bukimi («mysterious»)
• Bukimi no tani
(«Valley of Eeriness»)
2. Different Hypotheses:
• Naïve Hyphoteses
• Morbidity Hypotheses
• Movement Hypotheses
• REFINED HYPOTHESIS: CATEGORIZATION AMBIGUITY
 PERCEPTUAL MISMATCH.
 «A prominent hypothesis (Katsyri et al. 2015) postulates that the
UV arises from abiguity that is experienced at the boundary
between perceptual categories (de Gelder, Teunisse, & Benson
1997; Repp 1984) – in this case, between non-human and human
categories»
 «[…] the fitted curve […] suggests that subjects rated very
mechanical faces most quickly, that rating times increased as faces
became more human-like, and that rating times again declined
somewhat as faces became very human-like» (Mathur and
Reighling 2016, p. 22 and followings)  PERCEPTUAL (OR
INTERPRETATIVE) DISCRIMINATION

17. 17
«On the nature of creepiness» (McAndrew and
Koehnke 2016, p. 10)
“ The “creepy” psychological reaction is both unpleasant and confusing,
and it may be accompanied by physical symptoms such as feeling
cold or chilly (Leander, Chartrand, & Bargh, 2012)”.
“The fact that social exclusion and other types of social
threat produce similar feelings of “getting the chills” is consistent
with the idea that our “creepiness detector” is in fact a defense
against some sort of threat (Knight & Borden, 1979; Zhong &
Leonardelli, 2008)”.
“It is our belief that creepiness is anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of
whether there is something to fear or not and/or by the ambiguity
of the precise nature of the threat (e.g., sexual, physical violence,
contamination, etc) that might be present”.
“Creepiness may be related to the “agency-detection” mechanisms
proposed by evolutionary psychologists (Atran, 2002; Barrett, 2005)”.

18. 18
Navigating a social
world with robot
partners: A quantitative
cartography of the
Uncanny Valley
Maya B. Mathur, David
B. Reichling, 2015

19. 19
IB.

20. 20
Valentin Schwind, Solveigh Jäger
The Uncanny Valley and the Importance of Eye
Contact (2016, p. 98)

21. 21
Ib. p. 101

22. 22
Gaze, Eyes, and the Uncanny
• Pediophobia, eisoptrophobia &
Co.
• Fetishism
• Oculocentrism
• Non-acceptance of the
Panopticon if associated with
anthropomorphization
• Being watched reveals our
fragility, it is a summons
(Levinás, Ponzio), it creates a
semiotic (and perceptually
ontological) short-circuit
(interpellation) (Sartre, Merleau-
Ponty, Žižek)
• In the eyes there is the sparkle
of life. In the synthetic face in
the eyes there is the summa of
uncertainty  the Uncanny
Dead Silence (Wan 2007)

23. 23
Hal9000 and Wall-E

24. 24
Semiotics of the Synthetic Face, Enunciation and
Enactivism
2 Syntactic dimensions:
1. The syntagma of the face (a big problem in terms of
pertinence, prototypes, cognitive processes and so on)
2. The paradigm of the synthetic face (which goes from totally
artificial to quasi-totally human)
Semantic Dimension:
Artificial
Non artificialNon Human
Human

25. 25
Artificial
Non artificialNon Human
Human
Uncanny
Valley

26. 26
Pragmatic Dimension
The uncanny valley as a pragmatic outcome.
• Modification of the common interactional
practices (human-computer but also human-
human)
• Problems in decodifying the enunciational
patterns of the synthetic face (that is, in
establishing the connection – usually
«naturally» attributed to enunciational
markers – between the langue and the
parole of the machine)
• Possible crisis of proprioception of the
conscience (which is an enactivist problem)
Mori’s solution: just not try to imitate human
appearance, but stop the design one step
before.

27. 27
A difference between active and passive
anthropomorphization (eg. Pareidolia)
Heider and Simmel, 1944

28. 28
Active Anthropomorphization:
• Feel of Control
• Interpretative Cooperation (which is basically an intuitive
operation)
• Ideologically oriented (mankind superior to the other)
Passive Anthropomorphization:
• Feeling of suffering something
• Discomfort because the power relationship between mankind and
meaning is inverted
• Ideological fracture: the double and its consequences

29. 29
Cinema and synthetic face
• All animation cinema (with
significant peaks in the era of
CGI)
• Chappie (Blomkamp 2015), the
Star Wars saga, RoboCop
(Verhoeven 1987), Terminator
(Cameron 1984), I, Robot
(Proyas 2004), Automata
(Ibanez 2014), Metropolis (Lang
1927), Blade Runner (Scott
1982), The Stepford Wives (Oz
2004), Short Circuit (Badham
1986), The Matrix (Wackowskis
1999), etc etc etc.
• Digital rejuvenation or
resurrection: Star Wars: Rogue
One, Gemini Man (Lee 2019)
• Monster Movies
• Art films: Persona (Bergman
1966)

30. 30
Retractable Face

31. 31
Westworld

32. 32

33. 33
Bicentennial Man

34. 34
A.I. Artificial Intelligence

35. 35

36. 36

37. 37

38. 38
Small Wonder (Super Vicky)
“The Uncanny Valley conjecture then follows this long lineage of
mechanical relationships, and it symbolizes the current state-of-the-art
in technology alongside the cultural anxiety of transferred agencies”
Louis-Philippe Demers, Machine Performers: Neither Agentic nor
Automatic

39. 39

40. 40
Uncanny Prometheus: S1mOne

41. 41

42. 42

43. 43
Ex machina (a semiotic uncanny valley)

44. 44

45. 45
DIGITAL RESURRECTION
Star Wars: Rogue One (Edwards 2016)
“Peter Cushing’s performance in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars
Story is remarkable because Cushing died in 1994. Industrial Light &
Magic’s computer-generated imagery (CGI) wizards digitally
resurrected Cushing to once again portray the villainous Imperial
Grand Moff Tarkin, a central antagonist of the original 1977 Star Wars
[…]” (Alexi Sargeant, The Undeath of Cinema, 2017, p. 17)

46. 46
Ghostface
“Mori and others coming in his wake have confirmed the extreme
sensitivity that people have to facial displays and bodily
movements. In the case of the robot these key to suspicions of
animation and an inner soul. The idea of a ghost in the machine is
disturbing and the sensation of the uncanny presents itself. With
those unproblematically classified as humans the theme is slightly
different. The visual surface is interrogated for small signs revealing
the inner self”
Philip Smith, “Of ‘near pollution’ and non-linear cultural
effects: Reflections on Masahiro Mori and
the Uncanny Valley” 2014, p. 342

47. 47
Social Robotics / Roboethics
«The Human Face of Robotics», Tony Belpaeme talking about ALIZ-E
Roboethics: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Spielberg 2001) – Connection
face/intelligence

48. 48
Sophia (Hanson Robotics Limited)
- Saudi Citizenship
- First «Innovation
Champion» by ONU
(First non-human
ONU awarded)
- Mediatic phenomen
(Jimmy Fallon and
many other tv
programs)
- «She» is nothing
more than a
chatterbot