‘EX MACHINA’ (ALEX GARLAND, 2016)—THE POSTHUMAN CINEMATIC SUBLIME?

A cinematic sublime – following Kantian ‘moral sensibility’ or Sentiment (Emp findsamkeit) and correlationalism (Trifonova, 2017) – requires an element of the Brechtian ‘distance effect’ (Veifremdungseffekt). This is classically provided by the double-coding of the cinematic landscape. However, the dichotomous configuration of diegetic and spectatorial space (Sinnerbrink, 2012) – that maintains Veifremdungseffekt or a ‘critical distance’ of subjective-objective dichotomy – has been dissolved by late commodity capitalism (Jameson, 1991). The fact that “distance [between subject and object] in general has […] been abolished” (ibid: 48) became evident when streaming Ex Machina online from iTunes. Online streaming is synchronic and surfaceless: continuous with its digitally coded environment (Gandy, 2004), engendering what Bukatman (1992) refers to as a ‘terminal identity’. Such continuity means that we “never fully realize the phenomenological density […] and causality of the projected film experience” (Rodowick, 2007 21; 2009). This ‘waning of affect’ (Jameson, 1991) has methodological implications for analyzing the sublime. Whilst it may be separated from the cinematic landscape for which viewing was intended, potentially suppressing affective intensity (Massumi, 2002), algorithm – as a “logical coherence, of explanatory power, of generative capacity” (Rodowick, 2007: 12) – and its synchronic dissolution of diegetic/spectorial space (Sinnerbrink, 2012), allows one to read Ex Machina not as a text, (Cook, 2007), but as a dynamic and affective experience (Harper and Rayner, 2011). Indeed, this reading forges an accurate heuristic lens onto the functioning, changing meaning or possibility of the sublime in a digitally mediated hyper-complex capitalist society.

Ex Machina diegetically subverts Jameson’s ‘critical subject position’ (1991) to interface the immaterial “depthless” (ibid: 6) and unstable realm of Bukatman’s ‘terminal identity’ (Crowther, 1992; Bukatman, 1992). The ontological situation of ‘Man’ as a self-determined subject, independent from the aesthetic object of Nature (Pierce, 2012) – whereby “nature is ‘used’, ‘exploited’ by the mind according to a purposiveness that is not nature’s” (Lyotard, 1988: 137) – is filmatically subverted as Caleb descends, via helicopter, a Romantically sublime panoramic landscape of the Valldal Valley (Topping, 2015) (Appendix.1). He is placed into an allegorically postmodern ambiguous space (Jameson, 1991: 37); dissolving rational distance from Nature (Shaw, 2017). The architecture of the Juvet Hotel – the set for Nathans facility chosen by production designer, Mark Digby (Rich, 2015) – is ambiguously constructed and filmatically framed (Harper and Rayner, 2011). Glass and heavy metals flow and diffuse into the rock face; slabs of smooth cement extend from its jagged and nebulous form (Appendix.2). The filmatic framing of various atriums, claustrophobic guest rooms and indefinitely extending exteriors (Appendix.3) – layers of glass diffusing into and out of external shots of forestry – disorientate the facilities design. This allegorical space of postmodernity feels “intangibly abstract […] everywhere and nowhere” (Thacker, 2015: 107). Rather than juxtaposed to the Romantically sublime landscape, the structure diffuses indefinitely into it. This space has no “substantive, self-contained material surfaces”; it is unstable and elusive (Crowther, 1992). Works of art – including Pollock’s No. 5, 1948, Klimt’s portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (1905) and Titian’s An Allegory of Prudence (1550–65) (Johnson, 2016) – are juxtaposed against this material instability. This juxtaposition highlights, in a Lyotardian sensibility, that the “the pseudo-autonomous surfaces” (Art) (Crowther, 1992: 200) of postmodern space are sustained through complex, diffuse and indefinite immaterialities (Lés Immatériaux [Crowther, 1992]). It is this immateriality that renders the diegetic set of Nathan’s facility de-familiar and irreducible to a description of itself: “reality increasingly ungraspable, subject to doubt, unsteady” (Lyotard, 1995: 255). Neither Caleb, nor the viewer, can organize or ‘cognitively map’ the surroundings of this ‘warped space’ (Vilder, 2000), “no matter how abstractly, in the minds eye” (Jameson, 1991: 127). This erases “the categorical distinctions that earlier forms of the sublime have traditionally depended upon” (Tabbi, 1996: 211). Rather than an ontological dualism/transcendence reaffirming subjective a priori imagination (Kant, 1763), this postmodern space – a Lucretian and Epicurean world of turbulence, fluctuation and fluidity that ruptures the relation between ‘form’ and ‘matter’ (Merriman, 2011; Fedorova, 2017) – evokes an inhuman “ontological dislocation” (Lyotard, 1989: 206) that places it in the realm of the sublime that lies at the heart of the boundary of human comprehension/presentation (Darstellung) (Gandy, 1996).

 Ex Machina further ensconces this “ontological dislocation” (Lyotard, 1989: 206) by evoking the ubiquitous flow of data and its habitual diffusion into every facet of the diegetic and synchronous spectatorial code/space (Hansen, 2012; Kitchin and Dodge, 2002). It here comments on the changing meaning of the ‘technological sublime’ (Marx, 1946; Nye, 1996). The ‘warped’ postmodern filmatic space (Vidler, 2000) is imbued with digital omnipresence (Mosco, 2004): an electronic atmospheric hum builds ominously throughout, nebulously melding with natural sounds of a river. A satellite dish is the first thing Caleb sees of the facility, allegorising the omnipresence of digital waves and flows, again weaving technology into the natural landscape: “simultaneously coexisting with nature, dominated by nature, and dominating over all” (Bukatman 1995, 281). Techno-digital flows from Nathan’s ‘Blue Book’ company – reminiscent of Cambridge Analytica – and Nathan’s 24-hour panopticon video surveillance mediate spatial dislocation, further dissolving the few surfaces remaining in an already ambiguous interior. At points the viewer experience diegetic space through a double layer of digital screens (Appendix.4) – creating a mise en abyme (Jackson, 2016) – further confounding disorientation. It is a digitally “becoming-fluid” spatiality that passes beyond comprehension (Hansen, 2001: 183). Unlike Nye’s technological sublime, this “limitless unknowability of […] potential” (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999: 16) is not a “crushing, omnipotent force outside the self” (Nye, 1996: 13), in the form of large-scale infrastructure that reifies the boundaries of the subjective imagination and sensibility – whereby the “mind feels elevated in its own judgment of itself” (Kant 1960 45). Rather, a neo-Lyotardian postmodern digital sublime is evoked as Lés Immatériaux ([Crowther, 1992]): technoscientific diffusion “thrusts […] immaterial processes to the forefront of our consciousness” (ibid). Our powers of perception and imagination become overwhelmed by the omnipotence and infinite extension of digital flow – the unboundedness and simultaneity engaged in extension (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999) that constitutes the synchronous diegetic/spectatorial code/space (Bukatman, 1992; Jameson, 1991; Tabbi, 1996) and the incommensurability of distinguishing between surface and simulacrum that such a mediated space operationalizes (Ward, 2001).

However, Gilbert-Rolfe argues that Lyotard’s ‘inhuman sublime’ (1989), and the postmodern technological extensions (Mosco, 2004; Tabbi, 1996), are “still concerned with the human” and a neo-Kantian crisis of the faculty of presentation (Darstellung) (1999: 137; Mann, 2006). The “not-human” (ibid:137) is defined against the very state it claims is absent. Ex Machina, in contradistinction, moves beyond Lyotard’s postmodern inhuman Lés Immatériaux (Crowther, 1992; Trifonova, 2017) by operationalizing a new diegetic subject position, allegorized by a fluid sense of ‘becoming-with’ technology (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), synchronous with a posthuman viewing subject constructed by data flows and patterns. The diegetic ‘surface boundaries’ of the four bodies – Nathan, Kyoko, Caleb and Ava – and material interior surfaces are all programmed and coded ‘through’ surveillance, becoming an assemblage of ‘biomediated bodies’ (Clough, 2008). This is condensed into one symbolic scene in which Nathan and Kyoko dissolve into a disco dance routine of Oliver Cheatham’s “Get Down Saturday Night.” Both bodies, equally lacking agency, are drawn in to to synchreneity (Appendix.5). The ‘warped code/space’ mediates and dictates the actions and kinetics of biomediated bodies (Vidler, 2000). Sentience is diffusely distributed (Gandy, 2005; Thrift, 2014). Body plate trackers on Alicia Vikander – filmed on the Sony F-65 with anamorphic lenses (Failes, 2016) – filmatically represent Ava as a transparent machine. When she cuts power off, flooding the ‘warped space’ (Vilder, 2000) with with hyper-red crimson light, the glass between Ava and Caleb disappear, rendering bodies indistinguishable (Appendix.6). The diegesis becomes a microcosmic symbol of the ‘posthuman’ as a “relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity” (Braidotti, 2013: 49; Hayles, 1999: 251). It thus ontlolgically dissolves the boundaries between modernist categories into digital mediation: all bodies – automated, simulated, biological, cybernetic, networked – “become equally insubstantial, mediated by a medium that has no correlation with things as substances” (Gilbert Rolfe, 1999: 112). One could argue that this evokes a ‘posthuman sublime’ (ibid.) response as it disorientates both characters and viewers and is reflective of the viewers ontologically polyvocal subject position (Braidotti, 2013; Rose, 2017). The posthuman ‘subject’ is in excess of ‘itself’ (Fedorova, 2017): technologies are the product of the mind, Nathan’s in the film and the viewer’s in reality, yet their autopoetic potential – meditating life both on and off-screen – transcends the human subject and therefore the ‘inhuman’ immateriality of Lyotard’s sublime as well (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999). The meaning of the sublime goes beyond neo-Kantian humanist ‘Man’ (Braidotti, 2013) towards technology “unbounded by the human, and, as knowledge, a trace of the human now out of the latter’s control” (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999: 16).

Ex Machina bridges the profilmic/diegetic/spectoral divide (Sinnerbink, 2012) by staging an allegory of its own production – whereby the digital, profilmic artifice portends the diegetic narrative of a concern with technology – “shift[ing] the cutting edge of technological ingenuity” with regards the cinematic apparatus (Kuhn, 1999: 38; Rodowick, 2007). Cinematic apparatus metamorphosize with the technological posthuman world the film comments upon (Mumford, 1934). Bukatman (2002), argued that the process of mechanical profilmic and post-production analogue composite shots in early SF produced a “scopic mastery” and “spectatorial excess” (Bukatman, 2002: 265) with regards special effects – allowing “majestic, […] awe-inspiring, and […] literally overpowering […] excess and hyperbole […] beyond human articulation and comprehension” (ibid.). For him, the technological apparatus enabling their realisation produce sublime affect (Warton, 2013). It would be possible to read Ex Machina in this way with regards digital cinematic technologies rather than analogue systems (Cohen, 2014). Cinematographer Rob Hardy lit the set with 15,000 mini-tungsten light-bulbs and shot the film at 24 frames p/s on a Sony F65 and F55 4K digital cameras (Saito, 2015); in addition to the DNeg art body plate tracker (Failes, 2016; Appendix.7). The diegetic narrative reflects the productions reliance on infinite streams of algorithms, code and requisite processing power (Rodowick, 2007; 15 minutes of 4K footage equires one quarter of a terabyte of hard drive space [Grey, 2015]). However, as Walter Benjamin (2002: 35) argued, the inherent interrelation between “equipment” (apparatus) and “reality”, contributes to a ‘decline of aura’ (Erfahrung) in an age of facsimile (Abbild) (23) and reproduction (Reproduktion) (23). The commodification of spectacle, and subsequently virtual special effects (Tuck, 2008), under hyper-complex sociotechnical capitalism means that Bukatman’s (2002) sublime – previously evoked by cinematic apparatus – is obstructed by a “series of fatigues or minor exhaustions” (Ngai, 2012: 272) and “prolonged desensitization” (ibid). In one scene, Nathan invites Caleb into his AI workshop – reflexively representing the pro-filmic production process (Appendix.8; Appendix.9). This blurs the distinction between reality and film. The software and computing technology used to animate Ava manifest the dangers and energies of the autonomous networked self. They function as a self-organising intelligence, endangering the boundaries of the image: diegetic Ava and profilmic Alicia Vikander become “a part” (Deleuze, 1988 106) of a continuum. However, because of a ‘digital banal’ (Dinnen, 2018), the viewer does not experience a neo-Kantian transcendence challenging and affirming subjective boundaries and reason. Rather, as a posthuman constituted from multiple flows and embedded within a hypercomplex system, we have an experience “in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom” (Ngai, 2012: 272.). Ngai (2012) thus revises what she sees as the anachronistic category of the sublime as ‘stuplimity’: an osscilating symbiosis between sublimity and banality. Ex Machina evokes this stuplimity, through the counter-position of diegetic and profilmic posthumanist techno-diffusion, and it’s blurring with reality, which evokes “an indefinite state without resolution” (Shinkle, 2013 np). Indeed, it is this “indefinite state” (ibid) that is a reflection of the ambivalent position of technology in contemporary culture (Vassilau, 2017).

One could finally argue then, that the sublime of Ex Machina moves beyond aesthetics completely (Wamberg and Thomsen, 2017) and is rather evoked as an ideological tension (Zižek, 1989) between the (in)humanist, postmodern, techno-digital sublime (Lyotard, 1989; Crowther, 1992) and its incommensurability with ‘post-anthropocentric posthumanism’ potentiality (Braidotti, 2013; Fedorova, 2017) and digital banality (Dinnen, 2018). This is reflective of a wider ideological incommensurability: the “grafting of the posthuman onto a liberal humanist view of the self” (Hayles, 1999: 288), between the “bestializing and taming tendencies” of the viewer (Sloterdijk, 2009). Garland crystalizes this tension by operationalizing Utopian ideologies of post-anthropocentric ‘transhumanism’ (Bostrum, 2008; 2010; Bukatman, 1992; Jameson, 2005; Groce and Chandler, 2016; More and Vita-More, 2013) and subverting Dystopian anxieties of extinction (Claeys, 2013; Clayes, 2016; Floridi, 2017; Fukuyama, 2002). He states that Ex Machina is “a pro AI film, its not anxious about AI […] the emotional position is with the machine” (Garland, 2015): “stand with the machine […] where I stand” (Garland, 2016). In one scene, Nathan and Caleb sit beside a river: Nathan states that Ava, “just like you or me, […is] part of a continuum.”, suggesting that “one day, the AIs are going to look back at us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.” The language of ‘continuum’ and geological time invokes the Deleuzian concept of “continuous transition,” of which all things are “a part” (1988: 105-106): a “virtual and continuous multiplicity” (Deleuze, 1988: 38). Evolution is framed as an “almost entirely nonhuman, chronicle of evanescence and extinction” (Clarke, 2017: 47). This conversation is one of few scenes that take place in the geo-glacial landscape of the Valldal Valley (Appendix.10). This landscape – carved from the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet during the Younger Dryas (c. 12.9–11.5 ka BP) (Eilertson, et al. 2016) – allegorises deep geological time, devoid of humanity (Appendix.11). This is counterpoised onto Nathan’s narrative of the future, equally devoid of humans (Clarke, 2017): filmatically representing Garland’s ‘nonhuman’ Utopian future by implying a world indifferent to the survival of the (post)human (Grove and Chandler, 2016). It is at this praxis that a Zižekean (1989) ideological sublime is evoked in the viewer. Garlands transhumanism and posthuman diegesis are “impossible” Zižek (2007 np) to imagine within a framework and structures of feeling of enduring humanist notions of causality and agency (Braidotti, 2013; Williams, 1979; Hayels, 1999). This ideological sublime reflects “the response of a human-physically, emotionally and intellectually” (Beckley, 2007: 7) to the changing relations with technology: specifically, why we can not imagine Garlands Utopiansim whilst embedded in a deeply enduring discursive matrix assuming the ontological pre-existence of the Human: older industrial fears about the technologization of humans are displaced by a more diffuse anxiety about humanity’s place in a techno-cultural system (Rutsky, 2016).

 To conclude, Ex Machina traces a genealogy of the changing meaning of the sublime. The filmatic landscape toggles from a Natural sublime of the Valldal Valley, to a postmodern ‘warped space’ (Vilder, 2000) – depthless (Jameson, 1991), immaterial (Crowther, 1992) and coded – calling into question “the nature and extent of the coupling of body and space” (Hansen, 2011 176) and modern aesthetic sensibility. Imposed onto this are techno-digital questions of posthuman sublimity (Gilbert-Rolfe, 1999) and its very possibility in relation to the posthuman subject and ‘distributed cognition’ that the film dietetically portends. Ultimately, it is this very tension, between the (in)humanist, postmodern, techno-digital sublime (Lyotard, 1989; Crowther, 1992) and its incommensurability with ‘post-anthropocentric posthumanist’ potentiality (Braidotti, 2013; Fedorova, 2017), that evokes a Zižekian (1989) ideolological sublime. The viewer calls into question the very ontogenesis of (post)humanism and deeply entrenched cultural structures of feeling (Williams, 1979): why we feel the way we do about technology, and our changing relation (Latour, 1993) with regards our dystopian fears, transhumanist hopes, or simple indifference under hyper-commodification (Ngai, 2012). Ultimately then, the meaning of the ‘Sublime’ changes from a metaphysical concept reaffirming the boundaries of the Human (Tabbi, 1992), to one that heuristically deconstructs the dialectical re/deaffirmation of this subjectivity (Coestello, 2012) – “what kind of self it might […] be said to proper” (Gilbert-Rolfe 1999: 2), and its subsequent affective sensibility.

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