Body Image in AI Movies: a Way to Understand the Posthuman

Body Image in AI Movies: A Way to Understand the Posthuman

WANG Kunyu

Abstract The posthuman body image, as an embodiment of posthuman thinking, is an important means of understanding posthuman. The body models created by artiﬁcial intelligence (AI) movies introduce multi- ple elements such as genetic engineering, enhanced exoskeleton, and cylinder midbrain. They are arranged and combined with the thinking objects, including body, soul, gender and reproduction, thus produc- ing several posthuman body models. At the same time, new medium technologies—3D, 4D, VR, AR and MR—are redefining movies. Images have become increasingly three-dimensional,“ quasi-induc- tive” and materialized, and are turned into a process-relational event in physical experience. The body is not only the core element of the world constructed by images but also the object that receives moving images or the subject that facilitates this process-relational event.

Keywords AI movies; posthuman; media-body; body image; process

DOI: 10.12184/wspppllWSP2515-470207.20200402

11.. Body Image: The Embodiment of the Posthuman Imagination

he human body has long been the source and core of Tlanguage creation and artistic imagination. With the About the author Kunyu Wang, graduated from Peking University with a Ph.D. (Fine Art) degree, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont in the United States and an associate professor at the College of Liberal Arts, Chongqing Normal University. His research interests include ecological movies, AI movies, body aesthetics, etc.

·118· Body Image in AI Movies: A Way to Understand the Posthuman

technological development of biochemical and AI, the posthuman condition has become an important topic in literature and movie researches. In this context, the human physical body and the posthuman concepts inevitably overlap in images. The overlapping images mainly appear in a sub-type of science fiction movies called artificial intelligence movies. To a certain extent, it is precisely because of the development of AI that the ubiquitous images have undergone dramatic changes, bringing the emergence of the posthuman body proposition. Therefore, an in-depth study of posthuman discourse from the perspective of body image is conducive to deepening our ontological cognition of posthuman discourse. On the back cover of the Chinese version How We Became Posthuman, it is bluntly stated that this book is“ a key to the world of science fiction and film.” It is written in large fonts that“ our days as human beings are numbered, and we will eventually become posthuman.” This book may inadvertently remind us of an emerging medium: AI films as the medium or grip of envisioning posthuman. The importance of imagination should be attached enough attention, just as Ein- stein believed that“ imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited while imagination encircles the world.”1 At the main forum of the 2017 World Robot Conference, Paolo Dario, a professor of biorobotics at the Univer- sity of Santa Ana in Pisa, Italy, delivered a keynote speech on“ Robot Partners: How Science Fiction Becomes Reality”, particularly citing the example of the film I, Robot. He points out that science fiction films contained valuable and even practical ideas.2 In this sense, the relationship among technology, discourse, and films reflects a two-way interaction. On the one hand, the films, being partly an embodiment of imagination, provide potential image deduction of technology and discourse. On the other hand, the roadshow of the films may orient new possible directions for AI development and even theoretical discourse. AI films may thus direct scientific improvements for technology, or may be products of false imagination sprung from discourse. In practice, the earlier AI films tended to be “whimsical” while the recent ones are inclined to originate in science and technology. As far as the current situation is concerned, AI films constitute a sub-type of science fiction films that are produced under the influence of AI technology and related discourse. Cybernetics, biotechnology and unbounded flow of data are taken as the“ high concept” of the integrated film; human-machine relationship, ethical transformation, doomsday nuclear explosion and man-machine war are

·119· Critical Theory Vol.4 No.2 taken as the narrative themes; the future installation, posthuman body, and escha- tological black aesthetics are taken as the foundations of the aesthetic construc- tion. This sub-type distinguishes itself from other science fiction sub-types—such as space-time traversal, alien contact—in its presentation of the future AI world. It is a symbolic system synthesized by imagination and technical discourse that reflects on AI and human existence.3 To a certain extent, our perceptions and experiences are shaped by images, words, and technology. Images are only part of them so their influence in popular culture cannot be overemphasized. Adrian Ivakhiv of the University of Vermont says in his Ecology of Moving Image: Film, Affect, Nature,“ We live and move in a world that swirls with tempestuous currents made of a kind of audiovisual image-substance. Photographs, films and television programs, videos and computer games—these and other moving images blend and mix with images of the exter- nal and internal worlds produced by a global array of instruments” 4 This mixing is the main feature of the current concepts used in AI discourse and art. Adrian Ivakhiv divided the world created by the film into three intertwined dimensions: object-world, which expresses cinema’s“ geomorphism”; subject-world, which is the“ anthropomorphism”; and life-world, the“ interpercep- tive” and“ biomorphic” world of things that are alive. In his“ process-relational” film view, he holds that human actions and perceptions are the first driving forces that has realized the film world. Therefore, no matter what kind of movie, the camera always focuses on human images, movements and expressions. The body, which is the most direct image of human beings, becomes the center of most film expressions accordingly. The starting point of the story in AI movies often comes from the upgrade, damage, reorganization, genetic mutation of a certain body, or how such a body transformation redesigns the relationship between man and man, man and machines or man and the society. In addition, the contradictions and conflicts between humans and animals, humans and Cyborg are developed from these scenarios. The context and logic of the development of the story are constructed in this way.

22.. The Anthropomorphic Posthuman Body

AI movies are mainly related to mechanical engineering (cybernetics), bio-

·120· Body Image in AI Movies: A Way to Understand the Posthuman chemical technology (genetic engineering), and symbolism theory as the source of high concepts. In order to present these high concepts in a way that can be understood by the audience, the body naturally becomes the preferred symbol. At the same time, this body image is different from the human body of daily practice: It is a humanoid that integrates imagination and theoretical thinking— a posthuman body. The performance and implementation of the posthuman ideas are mainly reflected in the condition of skin, for example stitching, biochemical enhancement, code incarnation, and the like. The stitched skin of a superficial body with mechanical structures is the earliest embodiment of the posthuman body. The realization that the human body becomes a machine comes from the development of anatomy, zoology, and neu- roscience. As early as the eighteenth century, Julien De La Mettrie published a lengthy paper L'homme-Machine (Man-Machine). In the same context, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, in which Frankenstein, based on and integrated human knowledge of physiology, anatomy, chemistry, and electricity at that time, had a spliced human-like body with human skin but it was extremely ugly. This body image has been a prototype of posthuman bodies portrayed in a series of films in the 20th century, such as Maria in the Metropolis, the Iron Man, Suzi in the Ghost in the Shell, the Terminator, the Robocop, and the Battle Angel Alita. In the settings of these films, machines are constructed human-like to be what we call“ humanoid machines”, but the presentation are related to the reality and imagination of the time: such as the steel body and current energy supply of Maria in the Metropolis, the combination of the human head and armor in the Robocop, the titanium alloy exoskeleton and nuclear energy supply in the Iron Man, and the body that randomly switch between liquid and solid in the T 1000, and the brain-computer interface of Suzi in the Ghost in the Shell, and Neo in the Matrix, respectively. These types of posthuman body are the earliest imagination and the most common images in AI movies. Although the image has been continuously upgraded with the advancement of academic discourse, it has never been separated from the mutilation of skin and splicing of Frankenstein. The second type of posthuman body is one with enhanced biochemistry or genetic transformation. This idea reflects through projections of biochemical technology and genetic engineering in film and television works. Typical exam- ples include the Steve Rogers in the Captain America, Lucy in Superbody, Adam in Sixth Day, and the replicator in Blade Runner. This type of posthuman body

·121· Critical Theory Vol.4 No.2 bears a strong resemblance to the ordinary human body but is strengthened or weakened due to the use of biochemical or cloning techniques. The cyborg sur- passes the ordinary people in intelligence and physical strength, which is to some extent an embodiment of human desires to strengthen their physical functions using biochemical and cloning practices. Since Dolly sheep was cloned in 1996,5 the cloning challenges of cattle, pigs, and even primates have been overcome. In 2019, a Chinese scientist genetically edited human fertilized eggs, sparking a debate over bioethics. It can be seen that the biochemically-enhanced posthuman body is on the verge of becoming a reality. Because this kind of body is excep- tionally similar to the human body in appearance, it becomes the focus to discuss the“ world situation” or social relations in the posthuman era in the movie in which reflections of sex, family, and social ethics are often constructed in stories. At the beginning of the 21st century, as practices for animal-cloning mature, cloning human beings in technology may no longer be a problem. However, due to the existence of many social and ethical problems in human cloning, this research is prohibited in all countries. It is not to say that such experiments have not been conducted underground, nor does it mean that such technology will not be passed by law in the future. Escape from Clone Island, set in an imminent future, explores how cloned human influences nature, medicine, and family ethics from two different perspectives. Although the body of the cloned human is identical with that of his purchaser, his thinking is independent, and it is precisely because of their independent thinking that the cloned human eventually killed the buyers. Alternatively, what if not only the body but also the thinking and memory are duplicated in the cloned bodies? In the Sixth Day, starring Schwarzenegger explores this issue. Adam, an old-school helicopter pilot, is cloned in a conspira- cy. When he gets home, he finds that another Adam—who is identical to himself from physical appearance to the love for his wife and daughter—is celebrating his birthday in the crowd. Adam’s memory is stolen by a vision machine during a physical examination and his genetic samples are stolen during blood drawing. In other words, this cloned man is another Adam in both appearance and mind. Adam is furious when he witnesses the intimacy of the cloned man and his wife. However, he was is unable to revenge, firstly because the killers sent by the clone company are chasing after him and, secondly because he couldn't attack“ himself”. Meanwhile, the cloned Adam is also undergoing a psychological test challenge when the owner of the clone company tells him that he is one of the first genera-

·122· Body Image in AI Movies: A Way to Understand the Posthuman tion of clone humans. He falls into a state of confusion and contemplation. At the end of the film, two Adams unite together, defeat the cloning company and win back the family. After the triumph, Adam regards the cloned Adam as a member of his family, but the cloned Adam still needs to sort out his thoughts and decides to go to sea alone for three weeks. This posthuman body also deeply connects with the creation problem. In the western world where the concept of“ God makes the man” is deeply rooted in people’s minds, the audience are inclined to believe that human beings are the new God who creates species when they are watching AI movies. However, as we analyzed earlier, films themselves are often critical of recognizing man as God. Human beings can also be an abandoned child of a kind of highly intelligent creatures. This notion is explored in Prometheus, in which the God of Creation— who bears a striking resemblance in appearance to the ancient Greeks—does not help the boss of the consortium to come back to life but rather kills him without hesitation after being awakened by human beings. If human beings were creators, would they, like the God of the bible, create species in their images, take part in them to make their companion, and let them watch over a new Eden? Would the body of creation be the same as the body of the creator? 6 The third type of posthuman body is the code-incarnate body. The thought of incarnation has a long history, which constitutes a mystery of human beings so far: how the leap from 0 to 1 occurred, that is, how did the creation occur. A class of AI movies offers a strongly symbolic metaphor for this problem: the relationship between people and code may be translatable. Nowadays, as 3D printing technology is gradually maturing, this kind of thinking has become more mar- ketable. In the movie The Matrix 1, the protagonist Neo is surprised the first time when sees the codes on the monitor screen and realizes that they are the thrilling scenes he have just experienced. By contrast, the watchman simply tells him that he is already used to them and to him those codes were just bedrooms, phone booths, fighting, or Neo’s love. The incarnation partly echoes the traditional di- chotomy of body and soul: The code seems to be the soul, constantly changing its host (the body), just as the name of the film Ghost in Shell suggests. Human life may be mere codes and we just don’t realize it. To put this issue in another way, this physical representation of image and story on the screen shows the limitations of recipients’ cognition. We are used to imagining and thinking with our bodies; likewise, movies use our bodies to

·123· Critical Theory Vol.4 No.2 present abstract digital stories. The representation of posthuman body aesthetics in AI films is to some extent a form of image anthropomorphism in the posthuman era. Through the analysis above, we find that the posthuman bodies in the AI movies at the current stage does not and cannot be separated from the limits of human imagination and reflection. Just as the disciples of Jesus were wearing Chinese robes and gowns in the Last Supper in a Chinese painting more than 100 years ago, the posthuman body is also entangled with the our current reception of human body: through the hybridization of imagination, they are bonded, blended, and articulated in different combinations with machines, animals, alien visitors, and the like. In the academic field, researchers seem to have an impulse for posthuman beings to transcend anthropomorphic dialectics, and they take the posthuman body in the movies as a counterexample to be transcended. However, if we close- ly inspect the time of the emergence of the posthuman body image in film and that of the posthuman discourse in the realm of thought, we will find the posthuman discourse does not take place before the posthuman image. 7 As mentioned above, we should not underestimate images’ importance in shaping contempo- rary social patterns and human thinking. Images not only reflect and present the world; they also create a new world that continuously generate and process infor- mation between countless images and entities. One of the important attributes of images is that they can virtually affect human emotions and behaviors and form an interactive relationship between the audience and the real world. The body, as the carrier of matter and perception, is on the one hand the subject, and on the one hand, it could be the object of acceptance and appreciation. The posthuman body images in the current AI films are analyzed and appreciated in two types: as humans, in terms of that they are human-created, and posthuman bodies. This embodiment of imagination interacts with AI technology and discourse; in addition, it spreads human anxiety about the loss of subjectivity, which is often displayed in the forms of posthuman doomsday plots and dystopia. How- ever, with the increasing role of images in shaping society and the advancement of film technology, viewers’ bodies are gradually becoming both participants and producers of the films, and they are likely to evolve into posthuman medium bodies, a unity of subject and object. The role of audience is a new issue of posthuman body images.

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33.. The Gradual Convergence of Medium-Body

The“ post” in the posthuman, like other post-discourse, is a transition paradigm on the premise of dissatisfaction with the existing paradigm but in absence of a more appropriate one: it is expedient. On a practical level, posthumans have already taken place around us, as evinced by the various cyborgs assembled with an inorganic and mechanical implant. Elon Musk’s neuro-weaving technology has recently made great strides, and brain-computer interfaces are moving from fantasy to reality. 8 We can understand the posthuman body in two ways. The posthuman body images in ﬁlms we discussed above are created by humans ob- jectively elevating the existing reality for audience appreciation, which has been the role of movies for more than 100 years. However, with the development of 3D, 4D, AR, VR, MR, and other technologies, the connotation of the films is changing greatly. The bodies are believed to be both the noumenon of human beings and a medium of communication with the world, as Merleau-Ponty said, “The body is the total medium we can have in the world.” 9 Humans constantly invest their desires and needs in the media, which can be called the“ mediatization of the body”. This is the reason that the body has always been at the center of various physical and spiritual media created by humans. Since human began using tools, the human body and the medium it applies forces upon have formed a body-medium alliance. Media have long existed in the form of tools because such alliance relationships tend to be short-lived. Humans grasp, hold, and manipulate media by hands, feet, and various body part to transcend body boundaries and ac- complish tasks that the bodies cannot. While humans have long lacked basic awe for tools, Bruno Latour argued tools are actants that exist in the same network as actors and are equal to their actors.10 Steven Shaviro put it more bluntly,“ Things bear their own power and their inherent tendency. When we use things as tools, we are in fact associated with them.”11 Wooden sticks, irons, steam engines, automobiles, computers, mobile phones have all formed this relationship with human bodies in different eras, and different body-media relationships have produced different types of civilization. McLuhan, Neil Postman, and others of the North American Media School all believe that media and humans evolve together and shape each other. 12 One of the most important features of the posthuman is the re-evolution of the body and the medium with the creations of new technologies, which then the two elements merges into one. The posthuman body will

·125· Critical Theory Vol.4 No.2 eventually give way to the“ body medium”: The body medium, or medium body, has completed the total integration of the medium and the body. The future of AI images will also move towards the integration of body and media. In other words, there will be no boundary between the physical feeling and the medium: They will become one unity. The augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies are widely used in games and movies, blurring the boundary between the virtual reality and the physical reality and also refines movies fundamentally. With the imminent ar- rival of 5G technology, the posthuman era that we can see is bound to be an era of image immersion—unlike previous compensatory or simulated images, the“ quasi-presence” image that enables interaction with people. The acquisition of this state is realized by the interaction between virtual equipment and human vision, hearing, taste, touch, etc. Human perception becomes the central link between the virtual world and its noumenon. In the last few days of 2019, the AI-written poems customized for users were popular in WeChat; calligraphic robot arms wrote better than human’s hands. AI translation is constantly improving, and robots doing sports such as badminton and table tennis are being promoted. Then, can AI produce movies? It is theoret- ically possible. As long as it has enough materials and editing capabilities (even to a certain extent, having ability to collect, write materials as well as translate languages), AI can edit images and sounds to form its own film and TV series. According to a research from Duke University, some AI programs can already generate short videos by parsing language scripts.13 Over time, such a short video will surely evolve. The various multimedia websites can be regarded as an online video supermarket, and different types of video“ goods” have begun to be resem- bled on the shelves. Such a wealth of material resources is bound to produce various libraries of faces, eyes, hair, waist-to-hip ratios, bodies, movements, and so on,14 which lays the foundation for the creation of AI movies. From the perspective of film ontology, we find that the connotation of films has also slipped as technology rapidly develops. With the blurring boundaries among games, special effects, and movies, the forms of movies and our perception will change accordingly. The Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, for example, goes further with the open ending, and the audience would choose the development path to the next story. Meanwhile, the scriptwriters, protagonists, and other narrative roles may interact with the audience during the process, which makes movies

·126· Body Image in AI Movies: A Way to Understand the Posthuman more like games, and games more like movies. Correspondingly, reality would also be like a game, and game be like reality. As a result, the boundaries among reality, games, and images are blurred. American film theorist Steven Shavero says in his book Post-Cinematic Affect,“ The 20th century was the century of ﬁlm and television. These powerful media shaped and influenced our perception. In the 21st century, new digital media will shape and influence new perceptual forms.”15 Finally, let us discuss the relationship between the posthuman body in reality and the posthuman body image. Language and sound symbols have been gradually improved in the past generations; the dynamic visual symbol system has also been perfecting for more than 100 years after its birth. It is an inevita- ble“ alienation” process, which is the evolutionary path of human beings since they learned to use tools. The wooden stick, bow and arrow, train, mobile phone, or visualized body—all are the symbols of human existence. If we cannot strip away this so-called alienation from the essential attributes of human beings, then we cannot deny that they are part of the human ontology at different stages of evolution. Since we cannot regard a naked body as the essence of a human, we cannot say the coexistence of visualization and reality is not the essence of posthuman. In this sense, the posthuman in a narrow sense does not exist. 16 One of the characteristics of the posthuman that we can see at this stage is the blurring boundary between the image and reality. It is human perception and affection that are responsible for the communication between the two.17 As a result, due to this blurring boundary between the body and the image, humans are easy to immerse in the posthuman body-media. Wang Feng analyzes that“ virtual reality will also produce a sense of the body”.18 It is worth noting that the media in the posthuman era would tend to become the master to control the senses and body of humans and then deprive them of their subjects. It is in this sense that as the posthuman era is about to be unveiled, we need to confront, interrogate, and so as to recog- nize and control our bodies. The interaction between the AI image and the posthuman body is no longer the old mediatization of the body in the past thousands of years, but it is the bodylization of media.19 The medium is constantly imitating the real experience of the body, so it is no longer a traditional medium that extend bodily abilities but becomes a part of the body in the posthuman sense. Because of the increasing number of variables involved and the acceleration of changes, how the posthuman body will develop is no longer easy to deduce and is hard to

·127· Critical Theory Vol.4 No.2 understand by basic human perception. The exploration of the intertwined relationship between AI images and the posthuman body has to come to an end, and we will wait for the further development of technologies, discourses, and images.

Notes

1 Albert Einstein, On Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms, Covi- ci-Friede, Inc., New York, 1931, p. 97. 2 For example, as Paolo Dario, an expert in biorobotics, said in the forum of World Robot Congress, 2017“: after the Internet, there will be robots, as in the opening scene of ” I, Robot“. The medical robot“ Da Vinci” has been widely used in the west, and the companion robot will become a reality in the near future. 3 Wang Kunyu, Zhang Guidan,“ AI Movie Concept: a Meta-Proposition That Needs to Be Clarified”, Journal of Shanghai University, No. 4, 2020, p1-14. 4 Adrian Ivakhiv，Ecologies of the Moving Image : Cinema, Affect, Nature, 2013, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. p.8. 5 Dolly (1996.7.5-2003.2.14) was the first mammal cloned by nuclear transfer technology in the world, created by Keith Campbell's team at the university of Edinburgh, Scotland. Since then, transgenic cloning technology has been used in the creation of a variety of mammals. The vision of human cloning was fully explored in Schwarzenegger's film the Sixth Day. 6 For a detailed discussion of this issue, please refer to my article on Artificial Intelligence Films and Reflections on Creation, which will be published in Tianjin Social Sciences soon. 7 The posthuman mind is often traced back to Nietzsche, whose Thus Spoke Zarathustra came after Frankenstein; at the same time, postmodernist thinkers Foucault, Ihab Hassan, and Friedrich Jameson are also often mentioned, but their ideas are obviously later than those of films such as Metropolis. More recently, the most important textual support in the work of Donna Haraway and Catherine Hayles is science fiction and science fiction movies (Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, etc.). It can be seen that theorists cannot presuppose that images are later or lower than metaphysical thinking. Perhaps a more appropriate understanding is: technology, speech, image is a resonance relationship. 8 See Wang Kunyu, Brain-computer Interface and Artificial Intelligence Imaging, Art Fo- rum, 2019, No.5, p62-66. 9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (Trans. Jiang Zhihui), Beijing Commercial Press, 2001, p. 199.

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10 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law), Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, p159. 11 Shaviro Steven, The Universe of Things, Theory & Event, Baltimore Vol. 14, Iss. 3, 2011, N_A. 12 Many scholars think that the evolution of the body has basically stopped since the beginning of civilization, which is an inappropriate recognition. In the process of mutual adap- tation between human and media, human body is constantly evolving or degrading. For example, the adaptability of human ﬁngers to piano and computer keyboard is to some extent caused by media. 13 AI movies can also be understood as movies made by AI technology or robots. Yitong Li et al., Duke University, USA, proposed a combination of variational auto-encoder (VAE) and generation of antagonistic network (GAN) algorithm to generate video for a short text. The research was presented at the AAAI 2018 conference as Video Generation from Text. However, the current degree of completion of this technology is obviously far from the same as the production of poetry, such as Microsoft Xiao Ice. Although we believe that based on the VR technology and various video materials and meta code, this kind of automatic creation is possible, but it will take a long time. 14 The author imitates the word-formation method of“ database” to create a series of words, which can also be continuously segmented according to the needs to create an unlimited “library” of body-related video materials. 15 Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect, Washington, Zero Books, 2010, cover page. 16 Discussion of posthuman in a narrow sense can be found in Zhang Chunxiao, From An- ti-Humanism to Post-Human in a Narrow Sense: The Leap from Anthropophagy, Theo- retical Studies of Literature and Art, No. 5, 2018, p. 48-56. 17 Perception and emotion in the posthuman era are another issues worth discussing. Al- though some scholars have discussed this issue through the relevant thinking of several French philosophers, it is still basically at the level of metaphysics. It is one of the next important topics for the author to think deeply about through images. 18 Wang Feng, Image Makes Reality: Body Sense in Virtual Reality, Academic Research, No.10, 2018, p.143-149+178. 19 Wang Kunyu, Body-Media in The Post-Human Epoch, Journal of Henan University, No.3, 2020, p.46-53.

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