Is it an ethnographic film? Possibly, it doesn’t really matter, better that it just be a film, albeit in an improvisational realist register, as she says. The Karrabing team combines its skills and starts to throw things into the composition: Kevin and Gavin ‘wanted to tell a story about finding two cartons of beer’ then corrupt police, corrupt miners… Corruption and pollution are the twin dystopic figures that organise this improvisation put together by people simply alert to what is going on around them—thus the realism of the text. ‘…corruption is irrevocably a geontology, says Povinelli, ‘the matter that forms as entities struggle to maintain or enhance their milieu in late liberalism.’
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Ex Machina. Machinic Utterances and Aesthetic Self-Reclamation
So, how do we move beyond the past? How do we move past the phallocratic traditions and its subjective invariants? In the aftermath of emancipatory politics and within a current age of media deliriums, where we are all allowed to scream and cry our outrage and become the users and producers of media and the illusions and dreams of detournements of Debord have been given to us all within the virtual-actual spaces of social networks; or at least, keeps us chained to a Freudian unconscious (a Freudian Robot). The question, Ex Machina then brings to the forefront, is more than a simple question of Feminist emancipatory politics, it’s a position outside of striving perhaps to take on the compulsion of consumption today: the consumption and compulsion to Identify, to share Identification, and to consume Identity. Then, how can we begin to grasp a capacity to think within the ever-changing landscape today in a manner where we take up a mode of consumption that would be akin to a capacity and novel mode of thinking within our current landscape of post-digital culture?
Ex Machina. Between Novelty, Self-Belonging, and Art
The philosopher Gilbert Simondon states in his work that the machine or robot in relation to its human creator, takes on a position that in the past was granted to the slave or foreigner or stranger. That is, the machine takes on a position whereby humans try to not identify completely with it, and seek a distancing from technologies they have created. Simondon, however also thinks that monikers and conceptions of technology that refer to machines as separate from human, that is, as autonomous robots and the like, are an erroneous way to envision them. For Simondon, machines are extensions of the human. If Ex Machina had another chapter, perhaps Ava, if she followed the hopes Simondon strives to set forth in his book, On the Modes of Existence of Technical Objects (see part one or this in-progress translation for English versions), would recognize her position as an extension of the human, as a care-giving machine and a negentropic, stabilizing part of humanity.