The Uncanny Crèche
Jennifer Walshe | Tolka, Issue Three, July 2022
Imagine walking through the car park of a supermarket and seeing a baby sleeping on the back seat of an empty car on a very hot day. The baby looks like it’s barely been born; it has mottled skin; the squashed features babies have for the first few days. It looks to be sleeping, but it’s not moving properly. Something seems off. Is it breathing? Is it drugged? And why isn’t it in a car seat? It’s lying on a sheepskin. It should be in a car seat. Jesus Christ, what monster would leave a baby alone in a car? You need to sprint over to the security guard right now, ask them if they can break the window. You need to run screaming into the supermarket to page whoever owns the car! But . . . Oh, oh, oh. It’s not a real baby. It’s a doll. An expensive, hyperrealistic doll sculpted out of silicone, which looks identical to a tiny newborn, with soft-touch skin, hand-painted hair and oodles of accessories. And it’s ready to be adopted now! For only £1,650! She will make you MELT!
[INTERIOR: Art gallery. A small dog is sleeping peacefully in the corner. A woman approaches and crouches down. Smiling, she reaches out tentatively towards the dog, then draws back suddenly with a shriek. The dog is dead. The dog is an artwork. The dog is Cheap to Feed, a sculpture made in 1997 by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Christie’s sold it back in 2002 for £131,200. It now belongs to someone their website describes as ‘a distinguished private collector’. Cattelan is also known for Him, a child-sized waxwork sculpture of Hitler kneeling with hands clasped in prayer. Him reached $17,189,000 at auction in 2016, also at Christie’s.]
New York City, September 2021. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is holding its annual Met Gala in aid of the Costume Institute. Kim Kardashian wears a black Balenciaga bodysuit so total it covers her face. Lil Nas X wears papal robes, a suit of armour and a sparkling catsuit, all gold, all by Versace. Serena Williams wears a pink and black feathered cape by Gucci. Grimes is carrying a sword.
Frank Ocean steps onto the red carpet, dressed in black understated streetwear by Prada. His look is low-key, apart from the fact that he’s holding a lime-green robotic baby on his hip. The baby is dressed in Homer, Ocean’s recently launched ‘American luxury brand’. The robotics are pretty great. The baby peers up at Ocean, out to the photographers, it moves its arms, it blinks. It seems like the sort of extroverted baby who is great at parties. It has an adorable grin which only later, rewatching the videos, you realise is fixed. Its teeth appear to be made from diamonds.
Ocean dandles the baby; he holds its foot gently; he talks and smiles at it. A paparazzo yells out ‘What’s your son’s name?’ and Ocean, grinning shyly, like any new parent, replies ‘Cody’. Of course, Ocean is stunting – he has a luxury brand to promote – but none of this feels like a performance. He seems lost in the baby, enchanted by it. You expect him to start babbling about its perfect shell-like ears. And I too am captivated by Frank and little Cody. I feel like I’m watching a new type of kinship, a new type of family unfold in front of me. Ocean takes off his baseball cap; his hair has been dyed the same colour as his baby’s skin. The cameras flash, catching the light of some of the 9,226 lab-grown diamonds on Ocean’s Sphere High Legs Jewelry Necklace, available from the Homer website for $1,898,000.
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Meet the Ingham family. Mum, Sarah, and Dad, Chris, both in their thirties; children Isabelle (sixteen), Esmé (twelve), Isla (nine), Jace (two) and baby Mila, born last year. The Inghams are a British influencer family, with 1.3 million followers on YouTube. Their brand is down-to-earth, likeable people who are willing to let you into every mundane detail of their gently wacky lives. Sarah, always impeccably turned out, glam in a non-threatening way; Chris, with his beanie and unfortunate My Chemical Romance hairdo. They could be any couple you know, except the difference is that since 2015 they have uploaded a video of their family every single day. Each video averages twenty minutes in length. The videos feature both everyday moments and special occasions. Trips to the doctor and pizza nights, shopping trips and holidays, opening presents at Christmas and waiting for pregnancy-test results. Titles include ‘A SPECIAL SURPRISE FOR THE GIRLS IN CORNWALL!’, ‘7 YEAR OLDS TEARS AND TERROR AT 30 FEET HIGH!’ and ‘EMOTIONAL LIVE BIRTH – LABOUR AND DELIVERY!’ There are so, so many of these videos. Seven years of this family’s life washing over us. People transformed into data, swept away in the endless scroll of content.
[INTERIOR: Art gallery. An intricately detailed sculpture of a baby girl lying on her side, modelled after an infant stretching out to her full length from the foetal position for the first time. Her umbilical cord is still attached; she is covered in smears of blood and other biological matter. Scale here is key – she is five meters long. She is A Girl (2006) by Ron Mueck. Mueck’s sculpted a lot of babies, usually either larger or smaller than expected, including Big Baby (1996), which sold for £825,250 at Christie’s in 2011.]
[Viewing A Girl for the first time at the Scottish National Gallery, an older woman in front of me leans into her friend and murmurs, ‘Well, he can capture the look of it, but I doubt he knows anything about . . . the smell.’ Their cackling rings throughout the room.]
In the early 1970s Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh joined the Marines in order to stow away on a ship to New York so he could make art. Hsieh lived a precarious existence during his first years in New York, getting by as an illegal immigrant by washing dishes and cleaning restaurants, experiences of repetitive drudgery which he began to conceptualise as artworks. Between 1978 and 1979 Hsieh staged a performance called One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece). He built a cage – a jail cell – in his studio and locked himself in it for a year. He didn’t speak, or read, or write, or listen to the radio, or watch TV. He was just alone in the cell. Every day a person came to take his picture and to legally document his continued presence there. On 30 September 1979 he simply left the cell. He was twenty-eight years old. Between 1980 and 1981 Hsieh did another year-long performance. For One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece) he placed a time clock in his studio. For a year, he punched the time clock on the hour, every hour. Each time he punched the clock he exposed a single frame of 16mm film, taking a picture of himself next to the time clock. At the beginning of the year he shaved his head and did not cut his hair for the rest of the performance. Out of 8,760 possible time punches, he missed only 134, mostly because he was sleeping.
It seems impossible to think of these performances taking place now, without assuming they would be streamed online. ‘SURPRISE TIME PUNCH REVEAL!’, ‘HIGHLY EMOTIONAL TIME PUNCH #1785!’, ‘TELLING MY TRUTH OVER MISSED TIME PUNCHES!’, etc.
[INTERIOR: arthouse cinema, a group of people gathered for a screening of Stan Brakhage films. First up is his 1959 film Window Water Baby Moving. Shot in the apartment he shared with his wife, Jane, the film features graphic shots of Jane giving birth to their first child. The footage is so explicit that when Brakhage sent it in for processing Kodak threatened to send it to the police. Despite critical acclaim, Brakhage was dissatisfied with the film – he felt it was too literal and didn’t depict his internal emotional state clearly.2 When the Brakhage’s third child is born in 1961, he shoots the birth. Thigh Line Lyre Triangular has much in common with the previous film – we see Jane in labour, in explicit close-ups, but this time Brakhage paints on and scratches the film, in an effort to communicate the intensity of feeling, to demonstrate the ‘patterns that move straight out before my eyes’. Rental fees $55 and $40.]
In 2008 I take a class on experimental film at the New School. Before watching Window Water Baby Moving, the professor discovers that none of the students has ever witnessed a live birth. As the baby’s head emerges, all we can see is a hairy glistening curve bereft of human features and a sense of tense horror gradually sweeps through the room. ‘Is the baby OK?’ whispers one terrified student. ‘Where are the eyes?’ shrieks another. None of us knew that babies are generally born face down.
Sarah, giving birth to their fourth child, Jace. We watch Chris wheeling Sarah into the hospital, one hand on her chair, the other holding up the camera. Repeated shots of the clock, of Chris declaring that it’s all a waiting game now. Sarah, in full makeup and false eyelashes, off her face on gas for the pain. Chris’s excitement as he runs down to the hospital’s twenty-four-hour Costa for a chai latte. Sarah, in a directional grey top with black lace panels, lips quivering with emotion, as she fights through the agony. More shots of clocks. Husband and wife’s hands entwined on her pregnant stomach. The midwife’s encouraging murmurs of welldonewelldonewelldonewelldone. Sarah pushing and pushing and keep going, sweetheart, you’re doing amazing, you’re doing so great and we’ve got a nose, we’ve got a chin, we’ve got a baby.
The emotions are the same as in the Brakhage. Some of the shots are the same. The simultaneous feelings of both intrusion and wonder are the same. I tear up in spite of myself. The video has over 897,000 views, 190,000 of which occurred in the last year alone, long after the birth.
In 2021 Sarah gives birth to another child, a girl named Mila. ‘EMOTIONAL RAW NATURAL LABOUR & BIRTH VIDEO’ is slightly less popular than Jace’s birth, with 324,000 views. When I watch it, ads for Dettol All-in-One Disinfectant Spray and Simply Piano by JoyTunes interrupt Sarah groaning her way through labour.
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The RealCare Baby® 3 Infant Simulator is used all over the world in educational settings ranging from parenting and healthcare to sex education. It is a realistic robotic baby, with the same delicate neck as a newborn and comes in a variety of skin colours and genders. What makes the RealCare Baby® 3 Infant Simulator different to a toy doll is that it uses WiFi to ‘track and report on caregiver misbehaviours’. Students must care for a RealCare Baby® as they would for a real child – picking it up when it cries, feeding it, changing the baby’s nappy and clothes, making sure it spends only a limited amount of time in a car seat. Each student’s actions are recorded and scored in granular detail. And no handing the baby off to a sitter – students must wear a wristband, which establishes how much time they spend in close proximity to the infant.
Instructors choose the difficulty level that their students’ RealCare Baby® will function at. Realityworks, the company that makes the RealCare Baby®, hired (real) parents to record their (real) baby’s feeding, crying and changing patterns, and these are the schedules the students contend with.
In a promotional video we see a teenage boy waking up at 4.36 a.m. to feed his RealCare Baby®. I wonder about the ‘ghost’ baby, the baby who woke in the real world at 4.36 a.m., whose schedule the teen boy must follow. I wonder how old the ghost baby is now. How it feels for them to walk around in the world knowing that thousands of people are feeding a robotic doll based on something they did as an infant. The mundane details of your first months as fodder for AI.
The RealCare Baby® 3 Infant Simulator Starter Pack retails for £1,620. This includes the doll, charger and software.
[INTERIOR: Museum. Installation version of Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece), owned by the Tate Modern. The walls are lined with Hsieh’s punch cards, coupled with the photos taken of him over the course of the year; a vitrine holds the uniform he wore and the legal documents he signed to enter into contract with himself to make the work. A 16mm-film projector plays a film. Over six minutes we see a year-long time-lapse of Hsieh’s hair growing. This is the only evidence of that year.]
[January 2022. My iPhone serves me a Memories video it has edited together from my photo library. The phone’s AI has decided to focus on my nephew, who has not allowed anyone to cut his hair since the pandemic began. Another time-lapse.]
Soon after the birth of their son Jace in 2019, the Inghams develop a partnership with the business Mary Shortle. Mary Shortle is a specialist company that makes a line of newborn baby dolls called Reborns. There are other companies that specialise in hyperrealistic newborn dolls – the Spanish firms Berenguer and Babyclon, for example, or Nel de Man in the Netherlands, but Mary Shortle is based in Leeds, where the Inghams live. In collaboration with the Inghams, Mary Shortle designed a doll based on Jace as he looked at two weeks old. Jace | The Ingham Family Reborn retails for £279. The price includes three vests, a hat, dummy and dummy clips, nappies, birth certificate and gift bag. It also includes a meet-and-greet at the Mary Shortle shop in Leeds, where purchasers can bring their Reborn Jace doll to meet the real Jace and the rest of his family. When Mila is born in 2021, the Inghams partner with Mary Shortle again. Mila, The Ingham Family Reborn retails for £403, and also includes a meet-and-greet.
Here we have a sort of reverse Dorian Gray situation. Humans bringing their fake babies to meet older versions of the real babies they watch on the internet. Real babies having their photo taken with the fake babies modelled after themselves. Jace and Mila, doomed inexorably to age, as their Reborn dolls remain forever young in the hands and homes of strangers.
Their birth videos will play for as long as YouTube hosts them. The only thing that will change is the ads which are served alongside, the affiliate links and the view counts.
[M. Night Shyamalan’s Servant (2019), a psychological horror series which follows the lives of a couple whose infant son succumbed to cot death after thirteen weeks. The mother suffers a breakdown after the death of her child and a reborn doll is, as the father relates, ‘the only thing that brought her back’. The couple treat the reborn as if it is a real baby – as if it is their baby – going so far as to hire a nanny to look after it. The plot thickens when their living son suddenly reappears in the crib in place of the doll.]
[Episode two of Chris Morris’s darkly subversive comedy show Jam (2000), featuring the sketch ‘Smart Pipes’. Here, a woman is pushed to hire a plumber to ‘fix’ her three-week-old baby, Matthew, because ‘the doctor won’t do anything, he said he’s dead or something’. The plumber, initially aghast at the prospect, is persuaded to take a look when offered a thousand pounds per hour. At the end of the sketch, we are assured Matthew is alive; we don’t see him, only the copper piping coming out of his crib, functioning, thanks to the plumber, as normal.]
In October 2020 the French government introduced Loi No. 2020–1266, a law designed to protect child influencers. The law creates a legal framework where child influencers are viewed as professional entertainers in the same way as child models or actors, and their income can therefore be similarly protected. More notably the law also allows children to assert their right to be forgotten. If a child requests a platform to remove videos or photos featuring them, the platform must comply, even without the consent of the parents.
Perhaps, this human is the most uncanny being of all – the person who requests all content featuring them be deleted. The person who elects to live only an analogue, undocumented existence, their data nourishing no-one but themselves.
[INTERIOR: A specialist toy shop. The shop is stuffed to bursting with merchandise, dolls nestled everywhere, a riot of pink and blue clothes and accessories. There is barely room to turn. Several middle-aged women are cradling newborn baby dolls in their arms. The women refer to the dolls by name; they coo over them, burp them, rock them to sleep. A lone man sits on a stool, staring at the women. The look in his eyes. Do not look in his eyes. A woman asks how much the nappies are. Two for a pound.]
‘The Uncanny Créche’ was first published in Issue Three of Tolka (May 2022). Issue Three is available to purchase here. Image is poster for Window Water Baby Moving directed by Stan Brakhage.
