Halo kid the new Starwars kid?

This following video came to me from the internal Roflcon mailing list which was originally set up to coordinate the organizers and moderators of the Harvard Free Culture-led, MIT-hosted conference this past spring. Now, the mailing list is used, in part, to share totally awesome videos like this one:

Halo Kid- The New Star Wars Kid? - Watch more free videos

Not unexpectedly, the video has drawn a lot of comparisons to Star Wars kid, though the striking difference here seems to be Halo kid’s awareness of and direct communication with his audience. Towards the end, he informs us that the outfit can be made into any color we desire, implicating all of us viewers in his performance. This serves as a provocative (and awesome — I mean, come on, the kid built a machine gun turret) reminder that the social media spaces are not only about communication and engagement, but performance. Conversation, dialogue, community, engagement, and whatever other social media interaction buzz-words we could list are all things that, in this space, are inextricably tied with the notion of performance.

Kevin Driscoll, over at MIT’s Gambit Game lab discusses the bodily elements of the performance on their blog, and points to the notion of the uncanny valley (check out the awesome zombie graph). Considering the Freudian uncanny, and the idea of the familiar-yet-not, the defamiliarized versus the unfamiliar, seems to tie back to what makes videos like this one, and like the Tron guy or the Star Wars Kid or the Cadbury Gorilla compelling in a way that makes us share it with others, inciting “viral” spread. Perhaps it is about a way of constructing performances that creates this kind of uncanny, that brings out the absurd in the familiar, compelling us to circulate something that makes something we already love somehow new again.