EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA.- The Edmonton Art Gallery presents "The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture," on view through February 23, 2003. Explore our fear and fascination with machines. For over 150 years, humans have experienced both a fascination with the machine and an anxiety around technology and mechanical equipment. The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture explores the uncanny relationships between humans and machines over time and through cultures. The exhibition offers a compelling insight into a subject that has captured the imaginations of artists, writers, movie makers, scientists and cultural theorists since the mid-1800s.

 

The 19th century was one of celebratory optimism in which biological functions were described in terms of the machine and machines were built to mimic human behavior. In the early 20th century, machines were simultaneously eroticized by the surrealists and viewed as a source of fear and anxiety

 

The era around the Second World War saw developments in the sense of cybernetics and war machines. From the 1960s to the present day the cyborg has been developed for multiple uses particularly by Japan and the US, including military technology, body implants and nanotechnology.

 

Today we see the cyborg image around us everywhere—in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, Star Trek’s Borg and William Gibson’s cyberpunks—but the cyborg has been with us since the advent of the machine. We can see it in the invention of the 19th-century automaton, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Marcel Duchamp’s bachelor machines.

Key works include early 20th century artworks by Marcel Duchamp, Jacob Epstein, Francis Picabia and a selection of outstanding photography by Eadweard Muybridge, Lewis Hine and others.

 

Contemporary artworks will focus largely on the uncanny representation of the cybernetic body. Works by renowned international artists such as Moriko Mori, Lee Bul, Ronald Jones, Kenji Yanobe and Gary Hill.

 

The Uncanny provides a unique opportunity to explore and address the long history and complex nature of the cyborg image in the 20th century imagination. It shows how the image of the cyborg has provided our culture with a visual metaphor for the anxiety that accompanied the growing presence of the machine in western culture.

 

This exhibition was curated by Bruce Grenville and organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery with the support of the Japan-Canada Fund: A Gift to The Canada Council for the Arts from the Government of Japan; The Japan Foundation and has been made possible in part through a contribution from the Museums Assistance Program, Department of Canadian Heritage.