October 2019
In this essay I talk about Alex Garland's 2015 film. Reading the film together with Vaucanson's Canard Digerateur and von Kemplen's Turk (early pseudo-automatons), I pick at the knot of autonomy and control, ultimating arguing that Ava plays out a kind of limited liberation. I talk about gender, sexuality, and objectification of fictional and nonfictional AI subjects, and I doggedly give a capacious, imaginative read that hopes for “a collective transhumanist solidarity towards liberation."
Written for Johanna Gosse's New Media.
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