Week 8: Container Disrupting Content and the Uncanny Experience

When I started thinking about this week’s blog question, the first thing that came to mind was a class presentation I saw last semester, featuring a slide that showed a glitch in a video game. Where there should have been a large rock rising out of the ocean, the was a perfect cube shape that said “rock.” These were ostensibly vestiges of draft versions of the videogame, a marker for what would eventually become a detailed object or at least a more accurate representation of a rock. What stuck with me about this moment and this image was just how uncanny it felt; moving through a digital landscape with representations of objects found in nature – trees, hills, shorelines – and finding a perfect geometric shape with a label. However, I only encountered this moment of disruption between content and container as an image in a slideshow with someone else's description, and as it was not my own encounter in the digital wild I felt I needed a better example. But this idea of the glitch in the digital becoming an uncanny moment stuck with me, and so I tried to think of another.

The next thing that came to mind is called “motion smoothing” or “motion interpolation,” but you might be more familiar with it in the terms I googled: “when TV settings make movies look like soap operas.” I’m not really sure how else to explain our perception of motion interpolation, but suddenly a setting on your HD TV makes a classic movie like Breakfast at Tiffany’s or a primetime drama like Mad Men resemble a soap opera like Coronation Street  – everything looks hyper-real or overly smooth, and the viewing experience somehow feels different as well. It is interesting to note the fact that the line between the content – the TV show – and the container – the TV set or screen – has become so blurred that the only way I can accurately describe the look and feel of the distorted image is by comparing it to a different type of TV show. Like the uncanny, the viewing experience is familiar but strange.

As noted, behind our perception of the image onscreen looking “too real” is an intentional process and option built into many modern HD TVs called motion smoothing, which can be great for content like sports but detrimental for movies. As viewers we have become accustomed, consciously or not, to seeing movies in 24 frames or individual images per second, as established by shooting on film. Video, on the other hand, is shot at 30 or 60 frames per second. In motion smoothing or “the soap opera effect,” the TV creates extra frames between the existing 24 frames per second, in order to enhance the fluidity of motion onscreen. When watching fast plays in sports this setting can be particularly effective, but when watching a movie it is simply unsettling and distracting.