Postmodern: The Fourth Wall

One of the characteristics that defines postmodern work is the concept of breaking the fourth wall, a "practice" which consists of breaking the so called wall between the spectator or viewer and the piece of work being shown. 

This concept follows the phylosophical ideologies of Denis Diderot but the fourth wall illusion is often associated with naturalist theatre of the mid 19th century.

As mentioned, the fourth wall is the immaginary wall at the front to a stage in a traditional three wall box-ste, through which the audience sees the play. This concept applies to any from of entertainment, including books, comics and videogames in which the charachters talk directly to the reader or player.

When we talk about comic books, the character most famous for breaking the fourth wall is Marvel's Deadpool:

Other than being a generally complex character, despite being famous for his outgoing, annoying and at times rude personality, Deadpool and the storyline that follows him faces other deep concepts such as death and how man reacts to it, self-awareness and the descovery of one's true nature and reason of existance, self-conflict and awareness of ones flaws, and the multiverse theory.

Here are some examples:

In animation we see the breaking of the fourth wall in the Loony Toons short "Duck Amuck", in which Daffy Duck, the protagoinst is forced to adapt to the constantly changing scenerey that the animator creates. 

Creepy and Surreal: The Uncanny

In this lecture we faced the topics of Surrealism and the Uncanny, two very interesting topics when applied to art.

As explained, there's a substantial difference between surreal and uncanny.
Surreal is something that is distorted and strange but the viewer sees it straight away. For example:

But Uncanny is something equally strange but the viewer can't grasp it right away:

For an Uncanny effect we can distinguish something strange about something familiar from something strange added to something familiar.

The Uncanny is more disturbing than surprising.

We see this in E.T.A. Hoffman's "Sandman"

Nathanael, the hero, first encounters the Sandman in the form of a grotesque lawyer, who performs alchemical experiments with his father after Nathanael and his sisters have gone to bed. One night Nathanael hides and sees what's going on. But he is discovered, and nearly has his eyes burned out with coals. He escapes but, subsequently, his father is found dead after an accident with an experiment.

"Don't you know?" asks the unfortunate hero's nanny. “[the Sandman] is a wicked man who comes to children when they won't go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they pop right out of their heads all covered in blood, and then he throws them in a sack and carries them off to the half-moon to feed to his little children; they sit there in the nest, and have hooked beaks like owls, which they use to peck the eyes out of the heads of naughty children."

This Stop Motion Animation is based on the Gothic Horror Story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, and features carved wooden puppets

The Uncanny is a conceptual point in a graph created by Masahiro Mori entitled the Uncanny valley. In this graph we see how the line move between the realism of an object, or in this case a person, and the empathic response of the viewer:

This is also explained in detail in a video created by Vsauce on Youtube: