Surrealism and The Uncanny Valley

Surrealism was a 20th-century movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind. The aim of surrealism was to reveal the unconscious and settle it with rational life. Surrealists were strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud's writings on psychology. Freud transformed the way people think about the mind with his theory of subconscious, which is the part of the psyche that thinks and feels without the person being aware of those thoughts and feelings. Freud suggests that dreams are coded messages from the subconscious, surrealists artists were interested in what could be revealed by their dreams. These artist like to put objects which were not normally associated together, together, to make something playful and disturbing at the same time in order to stimulate the unconscious mind.

"The Uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar". -Sigmund Freud

The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali described his paintings as 'hand painted dream photographs'. This painting is based of a seaside landscape on the cliffs in his home region of Catalonia, Spain.' The use of melting clocks are recognisable images that Dali placed in an unfamiliar context in an unfamiliar way. Time is the theme in the painting. Dali painted his work with "the most imperialist fury of precision" but only, he said, "to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality." However, the cliffs are those on the coast of Catalonia, suggesting reality.

André Breton (writer, poet, anarchist and anti-fascist) is known as the founder of Surrealism. One of his writings included the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"

The graph represents the uncanny valley, the proposed relation between the human likeness of an entity and the perceiver's affinity for it. The concept was identified by the robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970. Mori's original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, observer's emotional response to the robot will become increasingly positive, up until it reaches a point beyond which the response quickly becomes a strong revulsion. Once the robot's appearance becomes less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive again. This repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between barely human and fully human entity is called the uncanny valley. The idea behind this is that an almost human looking robot will seem overly strange to some human beings, will produce a feeling of uncanniness, thus failing to evoke the empathic response requires for human robot interaction.

Surrealism in relation to visual design/communication

Jindrich Heisler: Alphabet, 1952

André Masson: Automatic drawings, 1924

André Masson formed his images by letting his hand move freely across the page without conscious control. Masson found hints of images, fragmented bodies and objects which emerged from the abstract web of pen marks. Sometimes he would elaborate on these with conscious changes/additions but he left the traces of drawn ink mostly intact.