In early April, at the height of the pandemic lockdown, Gianpiero Petriglieri, an Italian business professor, suggested on Twitter that being forced to conduct much of our lives online was making us sick. The constant video calls and Zoom meetings were draining us because they go against our brain’s need for boundaries: here versus not here. “It’s easier being in each other’s presence, or in each other’s absence,” he wrote, “than in the constant presence of each other’s absence.”
Petriglieri’s widely retweeted post reads like the germ of a horror tale. The liminal space between presence and absence, reality and unreality, is often where the literature of fear unfolds — a place called the “uncanny.” That old aesthetic term for creeping dread, famously dissected by Freud, is typically now applied to disturbing specimens of digital animation said to reside in the “uncanny valley.”
by Margot Harrison, NY Times | Read more:Image: Julia Dufossé
