Installation view of Tales of hoffmann (2020-2022), 90in x 72in x 25in, 3 minutes, single-channel digital video, LED screen, wood structure

TALES OF HOFFMANN

Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley theory (1970) describes the unsettling feeling we experience when humanoid objects appear almost, but not quite, human—forcing us to confront our own mortality. Mori references Ernst Jentsch’s On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) and Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny (1919), both of which explore the unheimlich—a deep-seated uneasiness within the unfamiliar.

Jentsch and Freud found inspiration in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story Der Sandmann (1815), in which a young boy, haunted by childhood fears of the Sandman, later falls in love with a woman whose strange eyes and enchanting voice betray her true nature—she is an automaton. Olympia, the automaton in Der Sandmann, also appears in Jacques Offenbach and Jules Barbier’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann (1880). In her signature aria, “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” (“The birds in the arbour”), she mesmerizes an audience unaware of her artificial nature.

Tales of hoffmann is a three-minute, single-channel video that uses deep-fake technology to merge a miming performance by the artist with a photograph of a ceramic doll, synchronizing it to three different recordings of Roberta Peters’ performances at the MET in 1956.