Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection for the Uncanny Valley

Patricia Piccinini's "The Comforter", Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, 24 July 2018. Photo by Michael de Percy.

The "Uncanny Valley" creeps me out no end, so I entered Patricia Piccinini's recent exhibition at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art with some trepidation. 

The art works on display are so real, I kept waiting for one of the figures to blink or turn around. Like Nathan, the stuffed lion at the South Australian Museum. I stood there looking at him in his glass  box. And then his tail moved.

I was completely freaked out. Thankfully, the story of Nathan confirmed that there was indeed a windscreen wiper motor driving the tail, but it was so infrequent, and so life-like. I still shudder. 

At "Curious Affection" (thank God), nothing moved, but it was so real I expected it to happen at any moment.

This incredible blend of fantastical creatures with human and life-like qualities is not to be missed. The layout of the first half of the exhibition gave the impression that it was all over, except for a large outdoor balloon bladder thing  (Pneutopia) that could be viewed from inside and out.

As I followed the signs towards the exit, a small sign read "Exhibition Continues". And here I walked into a darkened room for the full uncanny valley experience.

The second part of the exhibition was quite the uncanny valley experience. Photo by Michael de Percy.

I admit that I was most comfortable when other people were in the vicinity. This would be a great setting for an uncanny valley horror movie. I found The Couple mesmerising and had to return to it several times.

Patricia Piccinini's "The Couple" at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. Photo by Michael de Percy.

I mean, Duane Hanson's "Woman with a Laundry Basket" is enough to freak me out, but that couple in the caravan, now that freaked me out no end. I couldn't look away.

Piccinini takes this type of art to a whole new level. I saw the Curious Beasts exhibition at the SA Museum in early 2017. It was not uncommon for fake mermaids and other unnatural curiosities to be made and sold for profit in the 19th century. But Piccinini's work defies imagination.

With Piccinini's work, you know it is not real, it doesn't pretend to be real, but you can't really be sure. Now that's the uncanny valley.

Book Launch and Presentation: Road Pricing and Provision: Changed Traffic Conditions Ahead: Tuesday 4th September 2018

Road Pricing and Provision [ANU Press] CC By-NC-ND 4.0 

The launch of our book, Road Pricing and Provision: Changed traffic conditions ahead, will be in Canberra on Tuesday 4th September, followed by my presentation: https://t.co/UWDpOBN81m

— Michael de Percy (@madepercy) August 17, 2018

On Tuesday 4th September 2018, our book will be launched and I will be giving a presentation entitled: Road Pricing and provision: Where are we now and how did we get here?

To register for the event, please visit the registration page.

The electronic version of the book is available for free download at ANU Press.

The Aeneid: Quasi-plagiarism or slow and deliberate Homerisms?

Fuga di Enea da Troia e San Girolamo by Federico Barocci (1598) [Public domain] via Wikimedia

The Aeneid by Virgil

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Last year I managed to do cover-to-cover readings of Homer's Iliad and The Odyssey, but it has taken me some time to get around to Virgil's "sequel", The Aeneid. In The Iliad, Aeneas is whisked away from the battle at Troy (to heal) and effectively disappears from the story. 

Virgil, in his epic poem written during 30-19 BCE, picks up Aeneas' story (much like Homer does with Odysseus in The Odyssey) and puts him on a quest to become the founder of Rome. (This occurred before the time of Romulus and Remus. Virgil had to reconcile the myth of the wolf-suckled brothers with the earlier Greek myth.) 

This translation puts the epic poem into prose. It is nothing short of gripping. I enjoyed Virgil's Georgics and Eclogues, but this work was brilliant. I can see how Virgil has adapted much of Homer's approach to story-telling, but with several differences. Homer brings in the scenery, such as sunsets reflecting on battlefield bronze, as well as stories about who killed whom. Virgil does similar, but without so much of the scenery. Of course, this is a translation from the hexameter form, and was originally written in Latin rather than Greek, so how this translation compares with the original, I am at a loss. 

What we do know is that Virgil was honouring Augustus Caesar with this tale, and tracing Augustus back to Aeneas. (I recall a family history on the UK's Who do you think you are? where one person's lineage was traced right back to Jesus, so such myths for the aristocracy have been common for centuries.) 

Rather than recount the story, and what I find most fascinating, is the story of the Trojan Horse. Homer barely mentions it, and Virgil fills in some of the gaps. But the larger story that has been passed down doesn't really come from Homer or Virgil. This is not new, but I was expecting that the three books together would give a more complete story of the legend that we have come to know. 

As for the "quasi-plagiarism" of Homer, I tend to agree with La Trobe University's Chris Mackie that:

In this sense the criticism of Virgil of plagiarising Homer, or quasi-plagiarism, seems rather unreasonable.

I am surprised to learn that the poem was never completely finished, and that Virgil wrote at the same speed I write up my research. For the record, that is "about three lines a day".

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