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CHAPTER 3: UNCANNY, UNCOMFORTABLE, UNKNOWABLE
Part of my research lies in the uncanny. CYBERROT involves taking liminality to a fearful place, being lost in a digital hallucination endlessly looping, exploring the futility of trying to escape my mind. Dissociative episodes are deeply uncomfortable, traumatic, and debilitating, especially when it's an ongoing condition. It never becomes familiar. While I vow to not traumatize with my work, a key part of my research is how to cause deep discomfort. I am looking into alternate horror genres, namely digital horror aesthetics and concepts of Liminal Space, Weirdcore, and The Backrooms for visualizations of the uncanny.
Figure 7: Artist Unknown (2023) Corner [CG image], r/liminalspace
Figure 8: Artist Unknown (2021) BA72FC53-BE86-46C1-9538-30085B7ED785 [photograph], Aesthetic Wiki: Liminal Space website.
Liminal Space is an aesthetic based on concepts of liminality, of becoming rather than being, they are spaces ‘in-between where you are and where you want to be’ (RAMCPU 2021). This is both taken literally as edited photographs (and digitally composed images) of hallways, shopping, centers, parking lots, and the like as well as figuratively through their otherworldly and dream-like appearances as though frozen in time. Existing somewhere between the real and the fictitious, these images provide a sense of eeriness. Similarly, Weirdcore exists in the space of uncanny aesthetics, constructed to cause feelings of ‘disorientation, dread, alienation, and nostalgia’ (Aesthetic Wiki 2020). Although not directly rooted in horror, Weirdcore conveys feelings of fear by combining vibrant elements with darker ones and blurring real and artifice. The messaging in Weirdcore can be confusing, for instance, a bright digitally composed landscape with glitches occurring or redacted and partial text eluding to an unsettling dream or memory, condensing ‘abstract feelings’ and ‘complex emotions’ into a singular image (Pradeep 2021).
Creating visuals of this nature is key to the visualization of dissociative disorders, somewhere between dream and nightmare, eerie, uncanny, becoming ‘unknowable or unspeakable spaces’ (RAMCPU 2021). I have in part taken liminal concepts and aesthetics literally in my project by creating endless passages and transitions through all environments. These passages, however, lead to more of this either passing through to a deeper layer of CYBERROT or trapping one in the same environment, playing on liminal concepts of ‘worlds within worlds’ (Stenner 2021:5). My interest in digital horror comes from its connection to liminality, creating visualizations where the ‘accent of reality has been withdrawn’, abstracted and distorted (Stenner 2021:4). They are imaginings of alternate realities and dreams where the boundaries of time and space are blurred.
Figure 11: Artist Unknown (2023) I Feel Rather Sick...[video], r/liminalspace.
Figure 9: ABSTRACTXD1 (2023) void void void [image], r/weirdcore.
Figure 10: destruction1999x (2023) Untitled [image], Tumblr.
Figure 14: shatteredharddrive (2023) Untitled [image], Tumblr.
Figure 12: TiM963x (2023) Live.mp4 [video], Tumblr.
Figure 13: Artist Unknown (2019) The Backrooms [screenshot], AnonDJ's creepypasta fandom.
The Backrooms follows in suit as a concept developed into a large-spread internet subculture. Beginning as an eerie 4chan post (figure 12), The Backrooms presently has 1000 levels created as a ‘collaborative fiction’ (AnonDJ’s Creepypasta Wiki 2022) considered perhaps an origin of the liminal space aesthetic. The urban legend/creepypasta goes as such: to enter The Backrooms one no-clips out of reality where they fall into ‘Level 0: “The Lobby”’. The key interest in this story is the horror take on liminality, to imagine liminal space as an ‘endless maze of randomly generated' environments (AnonDJ’s Creepypasta Wiki 2022), a quiet foreboding horror where one is ‘fully severed from reality’ (Rogers 2022). The Backrooms almost appears to be reality but abstracted and distorted as though an ‘adaptive AI’ is attempting to ‘recreate the world and we see all the past failed generations of that creation (Wendigoon 2022). Within The Backrooms lore, we learn that this reality is uninhabitable, not only due to containing no life, food, or water, but also due to an unknown mold in the air that causes terminal illness.
Figure 15: Kane Parsons (2022) The Backrooms (Found Footage [video], YouTube.
CYBERROT, being a digital space, tells a narrative of those within it being trapped with the threat that the system is “rotting... spreading... decaying”. I created the term CYBERROT to refer to the center of it all, a digital consciousness that has no concept of reality and because of it, is corrupting. This is displayed through visual and audio glitches and text. The language used in these messages is a play on digital and physical bodies, our bodies can rot and decay, while we also use these and similar terms for computer systems when software is dysfunctional. As described, this work is about reflecting and translating the experience of DR and DP and how this disconnect feels like a virus corrupting the system/mind.
The reason the visuals are based in unreality is to draw the audience into something ‘abstracted from daily practical reality’ (Stenner 2021:17). Instead of following directly, the layers against each other are the juxtaposition between vibrant exterior environments into darker interiors. They serve as a visualization of leading deeper into the hallucination. Beginning as somewhat approachable like Liminal Space, into something darker like Weirdcore and The Backrooms as it progresses to no end.
Although CYBERROT presently exists as video art, it is intended to feel like a video game. The aesthetics and concepts mentioned are informed by games, between ideas of reality glitching and levels of alternate realities. There is a thematic connection to Osamu Sato’s PlayStation1 “videogame” LSD: Dream Emulator (LSD: DE), where the player is aimlessly exploring dreamscapes. I say videogame in quotations as it does not follow the conventions of a videogame, it is a nonlinear interactive experience with no clear narrative or direction. The levels are referred to as days that begin and end by transporting the player by running into objects, buildings, and creatures/characters. The seemingly nonsensical nature of LSD: DE is true to form of the experience of dreaming. There is a total of 7 days, though the game can be played endlessly due to a system that randomizes elements each day, leading locations to become ‘bizarre assortments of textures’. It is impossible to navigate despite a ‘graph’ (or map), (figure 17) locating the layer between dream ratings between ‘Upper, Downer, Static or Dynamic’ (McSwain 2017). In my experience of playing, it was fruitless to attempt to locate myself, and began to feel like being lost or trapped in a dream. This non-linear experience is something I want to activate in CYBERROT by incorporating interactivity in future iterations. I have attempted to explore this in the work by connecting all the layers through portals or glitches that the view is transported through and looping environments.
Throughout all iterations of CYBERROT, glitches are used as an ‘uncanny intrusion’ to the flow through environments (Holmes 2010). Following Eben Holmes’ theory of uncanny play, I am considering the environments of CYBERROT as a ‘virtual world’ or ‘game-world’ where glitch is introduced into the simulated reality as a failure of the system ‘destabilizing the very symbolic construction’ of the digital reality. Narrative elements are introduced during these glitches in text form where the system is attempting to communicate to the audience that something is wrong. This is slowly introduced through each iteration as smaller instances of a doorway glitching in the first installation video, and complete pauses at different points in the experience in the third version. Leading to the fourth version of CYBERROT where the videos devolve entirely into glitches where the system has to “reboot”, causing interruption to the previously seamless loop.
Figure 16: Osamu Sato (1998) LSD: Dream Emulator, The Home [screenshot], Internet Archive.
Figure 17: Osamu Sato (1998) LSD: Dream Emulator [screenshot], Internet Archive.
Figure 18: Osamu Sato (1998) LSD: Dream Emulator, Shining Moon Apartment [screenshot], Tumblr.
Figure 19: Osamu Sato (1998) LSD: Dream Emulator, Flesh Tunnels "rare event" fetuses [screenshot], Fandom.
The sound design in CYBERROT is what enhances this glitch effect, within the installations I have used 2, 4, and 5.1 channel surround sound systems to amplify this effect to where audiences will not only hear the sound but feel the sound. This feeling is important as with severe anxiety, the bodily experience of panic and lostness in disassociation is intense and deeply uncomfortable.
Figure 20: Katelyn Ferencz (2023) CYBERROT: Layer 000: Loading Zone (V1) [video]
Figure 21: Katelyn Ferencz (2023) CYBERROT: Corrupted Footage [video]
As my first introduction to psychological horror, Akira Yamaoka’s compositions for the Silent Hill franchise (particularly Silent Hill 2) have greatly impacted my practice. Yamaoka combines sounds that are ‘disturbing in our daily lives’ to depict ‘feeling gross or fearful’ (Burns 2020). Sounds such as scraping a blackboard, drilling, and construction noise, braking sounds of a bike, and sharpening of a knife, noises we ‘dislike instinctively’ (Burns 2020). Yamaoka created a unique sound for Silent Hill 2 inspired by a sense of ‘ma... translated to “pause” or “space”’. Much of the game is met with silence, used intentionally and effectively for the player to focus on the absence rather than the presence of a threat, causing paranoia and anxiety. Yamaoka says, ‘The wavelength of having fear... is actually the same wavelength you have when you are relaxed’ (Burns 2020). This idea of ‘fear=relax’ in sound is a key consideration within the composition of this project. I have looked to create a uniquely unsettling atmosphere for CYBERROT rather than directly following horror conventions. Each layer has a track specifically designed to match the visual. While the glitch creates a jump-scare effect in some ways, much of the sound design has been created as a representation of how a panic attack feels. An ongoing, foreboding assortment of noise that shifts in waves while maintaining a sense of dread and anxiety. While disassociation is often met with detachment from the body, I designed sound the audience would feel through their body to reflect the anxiety felt during a dissociative episode.
Figure 22: Akira Yamaoka (2001) Combing Town West [video], YouTube.
Figure 23: Silent Hill 2 (PC) Apartment Building Moth Room (2019)[video], YouTube.
Parrell to psychological horror composition is the dystopian game soundtracks of indie developer James Hallet, AKA “Yames”. In his point-and-click horror games Water Womb World and Growing My Grandpa! Yames experiments with samples from reality distorted into unrecognizable, uncanny noise. Using a combination of ambient sounds such as windchimes and the unsettling noise of an alligator’s growl, Yames heavily edits the tracks into confusing, hallucinatory, and otherworldly ambient horror. I use similar editing techniques of taking samples, adding reverb, reversing tracks and layering, and using distortion effects for the result of creating a droning sound while simulating a sense of vast space or depth to a scene.
Figure 24: Yames (2020) Water Womb World OST [video], YouTube.
In combining these elements of liminal affective technologies (sound and visuals), the goal of the project is to facilitate a liminal experience, what Stenner (2021:17) calls a ‘devised liminal experience...which we do to ourselves in an environment of rarefied space/time' where audiences are effectively immersed in this digital reality. The key element to facilitating and amplifying these elements into a liminal experience is through immersive technology.
Figure 25: Yames (2022) Growing My Grandpa! OST [video], YouTube.
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