PERFORMANCE | Uncanny Valley Girl

Presented by Arnolfini as part of the Still I Rise expanded programme.

"We are witnessing the birth of a robotic Venus...dystopian, funny, and weirdly beautiful." (Art & Australia).

"The cyborgian goddess brought down to us in human form." (Review: Running Dog)
The history of women is literally interwoven with that of mechanical production: weaving, looms, switchboard operation, hardware assembly lines. Our cultural imagination has entangled the narratives of femininity and technology even further, in science fiction, horror, and post-apocalyptic scenarios.

Enter the fembot.

Uncanny Valley Girl explores questions of gender, technology, intimacy and power through the lens of the fembot motive. Shifting between beauty and horror, machine and body, eroticism and hostility, this performance lures the audience into a dark confrontation with their own gaze. Seductive and sometimes humorous, it will make you fear that technology is taking over, or that maybe women are.

The ‘uncanny valley’ is a robotics term referring to a steep dip in a graph measuring our discomfort when features look and move almost, but not exactly like natural beings, mapping the visceral reaction at the borders of real and unreal, of pleasure and horror.

Conjuring a feminist, cyber/socio-political imagination, Uncanny Valley Girl dives into the depths of this valley. What pleasures and horrors can be imagined in the void?

When something isn't quite alive, it definitely can't die.