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Keywords:

defamiliarization

Uncanny

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Defamiliarization or ostranenie (Russian: остранение, IPA: [ɐstrɐˈnʲenʲɪjə]) is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently. According to the Russian formalists who coined the term, it is the central concept of art and poetry.[1] Shklovsky invented the term as a means to "distinguish poetic from practical language on the basis of the former's perceptibility.[2]

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1. Defamiliarization of that which is or has become familiar or taken for granted, hence automatically perceived, is the basic function of all devices. 

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2. Shklovsky's defamiliarization can also be compared to Jacques Derrida's concept of différance:

defamiliarization draws attention to the use of common language in such a way as to alter one's perception of an easily understandable object or concept.

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 Shklovskij's formulations negate or cancel out the existence/possibility of a "real" perception: variously, by (1) the familiar Formalist denial of a link between literature and life, connoting their status as non-communicating vessels, (2) always, as if compulsively, referring to a real experience in terms of empty, dead, and automatized repetition and recognition, and (3) implicitly locating real perception at an unspecifiable temporally anterior and spatially another place, at a mythic "first time" of naïve experience, the loss of which to automatization is to be restored by aesthetic perceptual fullness.[4]

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3. Freud's notion of Uncanny

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The Screenshot of The Holy Mountain

 

 

I find the sense of uncanny in Alejandro Jodorowsky's movie, and in lots of movies from that period. The feeling seems to be related to beliefs we once held when we were children that we’ve repressed or covered over or hidden away to become adults. And in those nightmares, we used to have.

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4. The common ways to make arts strange:

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Using the opposite material to make the object.

Put the objects in a different situation.

Hybridisation with other biological characteristics.

Change the function of the item.

 

 

 

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Relative Artist

Robert Gober

Bill Aitchison

Roman Signer 

David  Fesl

Daniel Sinsel

Group show" Time to Time" Berlin, 2022

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Books and other resources

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[1] From Wikipedia

[2] Crawford, Lawrence (1984). "Viktor Shklovskij: Différance in Defamiliarization". Comparative Literature. 36 (3): 209–19

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