Of Mannequins and Manners

23 features, News, Stockbridge,

The mannequins were not just headless, but were often missing many other body parts, and clothes, as well. It seems mannequins come into the world as we do, in the altogether, but here they lacked the decency to cover up. Photo credit: Patrice Johnson

by Paul Crandall

December, 2019. The mannequins arrived on the front lawn of an unassuming house in the 800 block of S. Clinton Street sometime around Halloween. Or perhaps they arrived before that — they would have been easier to overlook before the fall foliage fell away. At Halloween, they served as one grotesque public tableau among many. But these were no dancing skeletons, no crude white-sheet ghosts hanging from trees. The mannequins were not just headless, but were often missing many other body parts, and clothes, as well. It seems mannequins come into the world as we do, in the altogether, but here they lacked the decency to cover up.

The mannequins’ nudity, and the whiff of sexuality they visited upon that unkempt front lawn, amidst the out-of-season hammock and furniture in various stages of tipover and disrepair, got people’s attention. As colorful, glittering Christmas lights and displays appeared on eaves and in front yards and the townsfolk sang O Christmas Tree, the mannequins sang Superfreak, and carried on with their suspiciously foreign ways.

Headless, armless, legless torsos littered the ground. Gleaming white buttocks mooned the busiest street in town. An unholy pile of naked bodies, waist-down-only and not anatomically correct, crowded a corner near a front fence that carried a sign declaring “no trespassing” to traffic passing by. From time to time, as the mood hit them, they’d shift their poses.

What was this? Was it art? (Even as townspeople took to social media to discuss the display, bananas duct-taped to a wall famously sold for over $100,000 apiece at a Miami art exhibition.) Just what was the intent? Was it blight? Is intentional blight worse than careless, accidental blight? The discussion that developed online failed to fully illuminate, though there were many comments in favor of the display, and some applauded the way it seemed to raise a big, public middle finger to the sensibilities of the village. A suggestion that maybe the mannequins could be clothed when windchill dipped to single digits seemed especially well intentioned.

A suggestion that maybe the mannequins could be clothed when windchill dipped to single digits seemed especially well intentioned. Photo credit: Patrice Johnson

As it turned out, even without the nudity or the weird, provocative poses, or the unfortunate juxtaposition of the arriviste mannequins with the heavy emotional freight of Christmas displays, the spectacle might well have cast a disturbing spell of loathing and revulsion among a fair number of observers. This is due to a curious hypothesized relationship called “the uncanny valley.”

Wikipedia cites articles in Cognition, Robotics and Automation, AI & Society and other journals in spelling out the “uncanny valley” concept, which suggests that an entity appearing almost human risks eliciting cold, eerie feelings of repugnance in observers. The idea is attributed to robotics professor Masahiro Mori, who wrote about it almost 50 years ago. But it’s hardly gathering dust in academia, as the creep factor of not-quite-right humanoids throws up challenges in robotics, 3D computer animation, virtual and augmented reality and other red-hot fields.

And now, behold! Here, blind chance has provided the creeped out among us our own in vivo laboratory where we can put “uncanny valley” through its paces. Perhaps instead of trying to put our finger on just exactly what it is that bugs us about these inanimate plastic objects, we should simply embrace them in the name of cognitive science. In other words, we may not know horsefeathers about augmented reality or 3D computer animation, but we know what we don’t like.

 

©Paul Crandall 2019

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