March 3rd, 2019
Wordcount: 1260 words
THE (IN)VISIBLE SCIENCE FICTION
When fiction becomes science and science becomes fiction
This comparative analysis is focused on the science fiction films Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002) and Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014) since both films attempt to materialize fiction through science.
As for the film Minority Report, featuring numerous fictional future technologies, which have proven prescient based on developments around the world. Before the film’s production began, director Steven Spielberg invited fifteen experts to think about technologies that would be developed by 2054, the setting of the film. As for describing one technology in particular, the film visualizes the architecture of the ubiquitous surveillance through their gesture-based user interface. Within the scene in which the character of Anderton (Tom Cruise) investigates a crime using a ton of holographic computer screens, controlled by simple hand motions.
Screenshot from Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)
Hereby Minority Report chooses to communicate digital information strings of zeros and ones by transparent trapping images behind plethora screens. As Lorna Muir[1] states that Minority Report alludes to the problem of invisibility by representing “non-materiality” through transparent objects and architecture. As she moreover indulges upon the aspect of the obvious problem of the representation of surveillance technology, as to be the computer and the virtual form within the physical space of the film. Facing the bigger question within cinema as for the problem of making the potentially invisible, visible.
This particular visual representation of non-materiality within the genre of science-fiction is a concept I would like to argue furthermore. Because as Spielberg noted that the prediction of the fictive future, is contemplated and intertwined through the world of actual, non-fictive, science. For instance, the Spyder technology portrayed in Minority Report which is used to enable constant identity surveillance is based around small learn-as-you-go robotic machines of the kind that were prototyped at MIT, indicating a direct overlap between the film and “real” world. Which makes me reconsider the fictive element within science fiction. Perhaps the question may not lie within the presumption of fiction becoming a science, but science becoming rather fictive.
To briefly give the example of the short science fiction by Lost Memories (Francois Ferracci, 2012), in which similar visual aesthetics are used to conceptualize the transparent ubiquitous architecture. However, the plot suggests that within the future this use of highly advanced technology becomes inaccessible in regards to accessing low advanced technology as for the analog picture. As for the science behind the analog camera becoming a fiction in the near future.
Screenshots from Lost Memories (Francois Ferracci, 2012)
Within the film Ex Machina, the invisibility of consciousness is made visible, through the materialization of the humanoid artificial intelligent brain. Within the scene that Nathan, the creator, shows Caleb, his programmer employee, the design for his A.I., a transparent blue object of “wetware” that looks like a similar crystal skull as seen within Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Steven Spielberg, 2008). However, the usage of wetware technology, in the narrative of Ex Machina, is a structured gel that can rearrange at the molecular level. This allows Ava, Nathan’s built a female humanoid robot, to learn when needed but to stay static in her learning when necessary. Nathan also mentions how the physical structure is chaotic. In our present reality, wetware is being developed, however, it is being done with actual brain cells and getting the brain cells to react to electrical impulses[2].
Screenshot from Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014)
Screenshot from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Steven Spielberg, 2008)
The aesthetics of the wetware are visually similar to the Vespers[3], or so to be represented 3D-printed death masks, made by Neri Oxman and her Mediated Matter Group at MIT. Conceptually, Vespers is an exploration of the transition between life and death. However, practically, it builds on the on-going research with the goal to merge the worlds of digital fabrication and biology in pursuit of materials and fabrication methods that can mimic the complexity and variability of nature. The custom of the death mask in the ancient world was believed to strengthen the spirit of the deceased and guard their soul against evil on the way to the afterworld. The Vespers are inhabited by living microorganisms that have been synthetically engineered by Oxman’s team to produce pigments and useful chemical substances for human augmentation, such as vitamins, antibodies or antimicrobial drugs.
Pictures from Vespers (Neri Oxman, 2016)
Rather like organs, objects can be computationally “grown” and 3D printed to form materially heterogeneous and multi-functional products. As for throughout history, technologies express the spirit of their age in design and are embodied within the archetypes they create. Oxman explains[4] that some archetypes, such as automobiles, airplanes, garments, prosthetic devices, and building skins, have evolved to improve the relationship between object, body, and environment.
Which makes more and more in relation to the visualization of architecture in means of its fictional temporality in both Minority Report and Ex Machina, as they are predictions of near-future technologies. Ever as the tendency to create forms of “transparency” towards the spectator, as for creating an “open” understanding of new technological sciences. As seen within both films, through the use of plethora screens as transparent interfaces, but also in the aesthetically transparent materialization of all brain examples given previously. Besides not yet to dive all the way into the surveillance and voyeuristic scenery within both films through the architecture of the glass windows.
But to draw back to Oxman’s notion of the embodiment of technology in regards towards Donna Haraway’s[5] concept of the cyborg being a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction, a condensed image of both imagination and material reality. Ever so Katherine Hayles[6] expands on the notion of “a god from a machine” (Latin translation Ex Machina) similarly to the definition of “a ghost in a shell” (Haraway). As she writes upon Norbert Wieners[7] theory of materiality, as for “information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day”. This conception of information requires artifacts that could embody it and make it real.
The perception of Virtuality facilitates the development of virtual technologies, and the technologies reinforce the perception. As Hayles briefly touches upon the term of “Skeuomorph”, as for Skeuomorphism is the design concept of making items represented resemble their real-world counterparts, commonly used within user interface design as for Minority Report. Which might indulge upon the further reasoning why science fiction films intend to represent the fictive machine aesthetically similar to the expectation of the science of the human. As the brain of the machine within Ex Machina is embodied within a visual representation of our known perception of what a brain looks like in human context. So it may be not a question if we have outgrown fiction, temporarily speaking, as it is already perceived within most science. But whether we represent our own common perception upon fiction to be able to understand our very own historic evolutionary technology of the human body. Especially when the human is still on conquest in finding out how the brain functions.
However I do wonder if the surface between science and fiction, between matter and air, as for the interface (Minority Report), or so to speak, the shell (Ex Machina), can be fictionalized accordingly, when the “ghost” might not be seen as a mere scientifical representation of our own consciousness, but when it has a science of its own, which lies beyond the human “wetware”.
There is a popular folk myth that if one holds a seashell to one’s ear, one can hear the sound of the ocean. The rushing sound that one hears is, in fact, the noise of the surrounding environment, resonating within the cavity of the shell.
WORKS CITED:
[1] Muir, Lorna. “Control Space?: Cinematic Representations of Surveillance Space between Discipline and Control”. 2012
[2] Nugent, Alex. “How to Build the Ex-Machina Wetware Brain”. In Knowm. 2015. Link to online article: https://knowm.org/how-to-build-the-ex-machina-wetware/
[3] Oxman, Neri. Vespers (2016). Link to online project: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/vespers/overview/
[4] Stinson, Elizabeth. “The next generation of the death mask is freakishly beautiful”. In Wired. 2016. Link to online article: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/next-generation-death-mask-freakishly-beautiful/
[5] Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. 2000.
[6] Hayles, Katherine. How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. 1999.
[7] Norbert, Winer. Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 1948.
Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)
Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014)
vvz204 