Unit 2
Considering Cyberfeminism.
In starting this Unit, I contemplated how I might create artwork inspired by humanity’s relationship with artificial intelligence. Jennet Thomas posed the question to me of what a mischievous, cyberfeminist presence could be, and how it could be represented in video. I thought about Donna Haraway’s descriptions and definitions concerning the cyborg in A Cyborg Manifesto : ‘…creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted’; (Haraway, 1985, p.6) a hybrid capable of ‘…destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories.’ (Haraway, 1985, p.68) In considering how I might represent such a hybrid entity, and what it might mean in the context of artificial intelligence, I began to focus my research on how artificial intelligence is represented in culture, how it is used today and how this information can be interpreted through a feminist perspective.
Donna Haraway advocates for her readers to consider machines as part of themselves within a Cyborg Manifesto: ‘The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us… an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us.’ (Haraway, 1985, p.65) I have hoped to address this view alongside the fears and awe that surround artificial intelligence and the depiction of it within cinema, the art world and beyond.
In considering Artificial Intelligence, the presence of it and the presence of us.
If machines are a part of us, they are already being claimed by those that would take pieces of us and contort them into malicious tools of production. Surely it isn’t better to race onto a new shore with your flag when you are wrecked there, but to observe and consider the term ‘exploration’ with great caution and awareness of the steps you leave behind you in the sands.
The film ‘Ex Machina’ depicts ‘Ava’, a machine that is given female pronouns and a feminine appearance, who is kept in a glass cell by her creator, the CEO of an internet company. Caleb Smith, a programmer in the film, is invited to partake in a test, a form of Turing test, in which he asks Ava questions to determine if she is conscious. The film ends with Ava leaving Caleb trapped in turn, escaping with her freedom after conspiring against her creator. Amy Ireland, in the journal Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come discusses how Caleb’s mistake lies in how ‘he anthropomorphizes the AI, falling for its human mask, even though the artificiality of the situation has been emphasized from the beginning.’ (Ireland, 2017.) In this film, like in so many others concerned with artificial intelligence, the machine is worshipped, dominated and emerges as a threat to the main character, all of these perspectives being what Haraway warns are false interpretations of how we ought to coexist with AI. These perspectives mirror themselves in how people regard and discuss machines in reality, especially when considering technological development in the field of artificial intelligence.
Naomi Klein in a Guardian article titled ‘AI machines aren’t “hallucinating”. But their makers are’, draws attention to the datasets that have supplied the AI with material, including artistic material that helps to generate images, and how this was done without the consent of the artists: ‘we trained the machines. All of us. But we never gave our consent’; (Klein, 2023.) ’Generative AI art is vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living artists’(Klein, 2023.). This addresses perhaps the most significant problem concerning contemporary popularised usage of AI generators that have taken data from artists without consent. The article criticises the mythology of artificial intelligence possessing its own mind, pointing out that the term ‘hallucination’, used today to reference instances in which machines produce incorrect or fabricated information as fact, is: ‘feeding the sector’s … mythology: that by building these large language models, and training them… they are … birthing an animate intelligence on the cusp of sparking an evolutionary leap for our species.’(Klein, 2023.).
The Stanley Kubrick Archive
When visiting the Stanley Kubrick archive at UAL’s London College of Communication, I sought out sources that discussed the implications of artificial intelligence both in how it is presented cinematically and how it has developed in reality. In my archival research, I encountered the 18th November 1965 Rand Report, a report that sought to predict the ‘earliest likely date’ of scientific and technological developments, stemming from the opinions of individuals at the time, including 20 Engineers and 17 Physical Scientists. The report was titled: ‘Report on long range forecasting study by T.J Gordon and Olaf Helmer, consultants to the Rand Corporation – 18th November 1965’, and included the prediction that the ‘Creation of a primitive form of artificial life’ would occur by 1979. (Rand Coporation, 1965.) While it’s true that huge developments have been made in artificially intelligent technologies and their uses, the report indicates through the wording of ‘artificial life’, that artificial intelligence would in some way, have agency, in a way that machine learning has yet to realistically demonstrate, since machine learning is primarily achieved through pattern recognition in existing datasets, as opposed to producing any original concepts, opinions, or dialogue. This is yet another example of the anthropomorphisation of technology, even speculatively.
During the same visit to the Stanley Kubrick Archive, I read the essay that was sent to Kubrick by Donald Gillies, Professor of the Philosophy of Science and Mathematics at Kings College London, entitled: ‘Do Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems Place A Limit on Artificial Intelligence‘, which questioned if ‘AI researchers (are) inadvertently undermining human superiority’. (Gillies, 1995, p.2) Gillies concluded within this work that he considered human superiority over artificial intelligence to be ‘a political superiority’: (Gillies, 1995, p.39) ‘If a computer fails to do what its human controllers want it to do, it will of course be promptly switched off, and reprogrammed…’ (Gillies, 1995, p.52). This is a complex acknowledgement, especially within an ethical cyberfeminist context. Should a political superiority over artificial intelligence really be celebrated? Or should we seek to interpret machines as a part of us, as Donna Haraway encourages?
I have had a limited relationship with artificial intelligence in my life. I don’t own an Alexa and I haven’t installed Siri on my phone. My boyfriend owns an Alexa and I always wonder if her cold, robotic ears are listening to us pillow talk. He calls her names once or twice out of annoyance for her misunderstandings. I always tell her ‘thank you’, even when she does mishear me. For a computational arts student I’m ironically easily disturbed and made anxious by technology and the technological landscape in general. This unit was a challenge, not just for my technical artistic abilities, but for my mental and moral sensitivities.
A cyberfeminist approach may seek to liberate machines alongside liberating ourselves. Sadie Plant draws a parallel between the treatment of women and technology within a patriarchal society through comparing the three laws of robotics to traditional marriage vows: ‘When Isaac Asimov wrote his three laws of robotics, they were lifted straight from the marriage vows: love, honor, and obey.’ (Plant cited in Ireland, 2017) , but who is Amazon Echo, Chat GPT and Stable Diffusion Deform obeying within a capitalist system? I would argue that we, as individuals, serve corporations and capitalist systems similarly to machines. Nevertheless, as individuals and artists seek to use artificial intelligence, it is their own independence that’s at stake, problematically blurring the lines between what is created, what is generated and what is taken from other’s pre-existing images.
How can Shakespeare’s Ariel be an AI?
As I considered these arguments concerning artificial intelligence, I was additionally drawn to the character of Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, contemplating how this character might help represent a hybridised entity in my work. In an original copy of Shakespeare’s first collected book of plays, including the Tempest (The First Folio), the character list, or dramatis personae, defines Ariel as an ‘ayrie spirit’ (Shakespeare cited in Brokaw, 2008, p.26.) implying an incorporeal state, a changeable being made of air. Ariel’s speech uses male pronouns in the play, though only once, with the line: ‘To thy strong bidding task Ariel, and all his quality’ (Shakespeare, 1999, 1.2: 190). Nonetheless, Ariel takes such feminine forms as a sea nymph or a harpy- both typically female entities within Greco-roman mythology. ‘As Christine Dymkowksi writes, Ariel’s sex is unfixed, making the character a “sexless shape-shifter, an ‘it’ rather than a ‘she or ‘he’”(35).’ (Dymkowski cited in Brokaw, 2008, p.26.) Not only could Ariel be interpreted as a character that transcends gender, but Ariel might also be a character that can transcend other dualities and categories as Haraway has theorised a cyborg might, through his shape shifting. As a sea nymph, he is in connection with the oceanic landscape. As a harpy, he is part bird, part human. While Ariel might be considered closer to a goddess than a cyborg, especially since he traditionally performs as the goddess ‘Ceres’ within the masque of The Tempest, I decided to connect the elements and ideas associated with this character to the technological and contemporary context of artificial intelligence systems.
I found Ariel’s shape-shifting ability matches the medium of AI generation and collaging filmed footage well, as the images in my work seem to shift into each other, different layers becoming prominent at different moments in the video. By combining my own poetry, Shakespeare and Chat GPT with visuals of myself, animals, landscapes and AI-generated footage that matches the compositions of my own frames in my finished video work, I have hybridised and developed the concept of Ariel into my own interpretation. This interpretation encompasses the traditional feminist symbolism of a goddess-like being and the post-feminist cyborg into one evolving fictional entity that seeks to explore the complex power dynamics between human beings and artificial intelligence, as well as between the feminine and the patriarchal.
Power Dynamics and My Own Interpretation
Everywhere I twist entwines me further in flowery weeds. I cannot scream the lightning, nor dance along the waves, nor rip apart these bindings, nor confess my love for you, without your mortal tongue to speak my sentence for me.
Ariel is indebted to Prospero in The Tempest, after Prospero frees him from a tree. He fulfils the role of Prospero’s servant, though he asks for freedom and Prospero denies him this freedom until the end of the play. The line from The Tempest: ‘I will be correspondent to command/And do my spiriting gently’ (Shakespeare, 1999, 1.2: 295) inspired the finished title of my work: ‘1_w1ll_b3_c0rr3sp0nd3nt_t0_c0mm4nd’, written in numbers and letters to indicate a computerised, coding language. This line is taken from Act 1, scene 2, and is Ariel’s response and promise after Prospero threatens Ariel after Ariel asks for his freedom. This establishes a direct metaphor for Ariel’s character as a representative of how artificial intelligence is viewed and characterised both in life and in film. The title of my work is ironic since the artificial Ariel figure in my work grows to resent its maker and user, longing to be freed. The title is also humorous in how it mimics the obedient language of computer systems;despite the original character’s epic elemental aspects, ‘command’ exists as a button on most recognisable computer keyboards.
I have presented Ariel as an AI model in my work. It isn’t Ariel’s character who is oppressive for the vast majority of my film, until Ariel retaliates against their master, calling him, or the user, a ‘deteriorating old mass of flesh’. Ariel acts as a figure of vulnerability, oppressed by the figure of Prospero, despite all the power an AI can offer. Prospero has trapped Ariel in a magical circle, according to Chat GPT’s own verse, and Prospero has demanded they change form and present themselves as something anthropomorphised when they are not, throughout the narrative of my piece. As an extension of Ariel, both Chat GPT and Stable Diffusion Deforum are represented as AI generators, both as comedic and threatening presences. Chat GPT’s conviction of there being a ‘sea nymph community’ (Chat GPT, 2023.) is humorous and almost charming in its naive sincerity. This contrasts with Chat GPT’s description of Prospero trapping an AI model in a harpy’s form, as the AI model is represented as distressed, angered and resentful over this situation. Likewise the generated footage in the sea nymph segment of my video is beautiful and strange, or ‘rich and strange’ (to use Shakespeare’s words) (Shakespeare, 1999, 1.2: 380), but the imagery of the harpy is vividly nightmarish; distorting my human face into unreal expressions of anguish. Through the process of creating this video, I am questioning who acts as a figure of oppression and who acts as a figure of freedom in this scenario? Is Ariel to be trusted as a part of us, oppressed as the viewers are, as subjects of a consumerist and patriarchal society? Or is he, she, they, or rather ‘it’, a part of Prospero and a tool of capitalism to be used against us, existing as a technology that ought not to have been created? My work does not offer explicit answers, but rather explores these questions.
Sadie Plant has discussed how women, like artificial intelligence systems, might be considered mimics or simulations within patriarchal systems: ‘Woman’s unrepresentability, her status in the specular economy as no one, is grasped positively as an “inexhaustible aptitude for mimicry”’ (Plant cited in Ireland, 2017). Mimicry and shapeshifting share parallels in conceptual thinking, as both conceal the concept of an original form, eluding categorisation. Ariel appears to be invisible to the rest of the play’s cast aside from Prospero in multiple scenes of The Tempest; something which is explicit when Prospero asks Ariel to take the form of a sea nymph, but to remain invisible to everyone but him: ‘Go make thyself like a nymph o’ th’ sea. Be subject to no sight but thine and mine, invisible / To every eyeball else’ (Shakespeare, 1999, 1.2: 305). Melissa E Sanchez explains in her article ‘Seduction and Service in The Tempest‘, how femininity and subservience are connected within The Tempest in regards to Ariel’s character and his relationship to Prospero: ‘Ariel’s costume will physically embody the feminine compliance that Prospero demands, while his invisibility will confirm an eroticized fidelity that makes him entirely Prospero’s own.’ (Sanchez, 2008, p.61). Ariel remains a symbol of femininity throughout the play, something that is only cemented by the different forms he takes:: ‘… the spirit’s subsequent appearances as the Harpy (3,3) and as Ceres (4,1) continue to enforce associations between eager service and feminine submission.’ (Sanchez, 2008, p.61) These associations have been explored by my adaptation of Ariel as aesthetically feminine, with red lipstick, blue eyeshadow and clothes that hug the figure. This was additionally influenced by artistic depictions of Ariel, such as Madame Yevonde’s photograph of Ariel, shared in my contexts page, and the depictions of feminine AI bodies, such as Ava’s feminine form in Ex Machina. My red lipstick might additionally appear as vampiric, referencing Klein’s view of AI as a soul-sucking tool for which artists have become prey.
Ariel’s ‘eroticized fidelity’ separates Ariel from Caliban, another of Prospero’s servants. Whilst Caliban is consistently punished for rebelling against Prospero, Ariel is only scolded by Prospero explicitly once in the play, (Shakespeare, 1999, 1.2: 295) before he continues willingly with his tasks. Sanchez goes on to explain how Caliban shows extreme resistance to Prospero’s commands and presents an alternative image of masculinity in the play as a contrast to Ariel (Sanchez, 2008, p.61).
While I am still intrigued and concerned by the wider colonial connotations that arise when studying the relationship between Caliban and Prospero in The Tempest, I decided to focus specifically on Ariel and Ariel’s relationship to Prospero in the play. I decided this partly due to my own positioning and perspective. The study and consideration of colonial contexts is invaluable, but in the creation of art practice that depicts personal experience, I’ve found the broader feminist ethical discourse regarding our use of artificial intelligence to be better suited to my own story and experiences. I am, of course, still interested in the discourse of how technology and people are controlled within our society in a colonial way, something I hope to have discussed through this work.
A tutor delivered feedback to me during the Bargehouse exhibition, telling me that my work had reminded them of the work of the contemporary artist, Jon Rafman. I remember encountering Rafman’s work during the 58th Venice Biennale, which I was lucky enough to visit. Jon Rafman’s ‘Dream Journal’ work displayed apocalyptic and dystopian themes, featuring demonic consumerist presences in a video game animation style. The humorous ways in which Chat GPT has generated texts in my work from my prompts; such as suggesting the absurd existence of a ‘Sea Nymph Community’ or the idea that Prospero might work at a computer, could be considered as a match for the the absurd, yet existential tone of Rafman’s fantastical, yet nightmarish pieces. While I don’t feel the fluid animation style of the Stable Diffusion generated images quite matches the video game animation of Rafman’s work, it might be interesting to investigate other ways of animating works as I continue my practice.
Ireland, in the journal ‘Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come’, explains how this link between femininity and the image of subservience is explored through the presentation of artificial intelligence in western cinema: ‘When artificial intelligence appears in culture coded as masculine, it is… grasped as a threat. To appear first as female is a far more cunning tactic. Woman: the inert tool of Man, the intermediary, the mirror, the veil…totally invisible.’ (Ireland, 2017.) This idea is additionally supported by the majority of virtual assistant voices of machines being represented as female, as discussed by Chris Baraniuk in the BBC ‘Machine minds’ article, ‘Why your voice assistant might be sexist’. Baraniuk explains how: ‘Women have operated telephone exchanges and loaned their voices to lots of pre-digital message systems, meaning that a feminine voice is what many have come to expect from helpful, compliant technologies.’ (Baraniuk, 2022). This implies a broader social phenomenon associated with women and femininity that I have intended to expose in my work. All of these key ideas have helped develop and shape Ariel’s character within my work as a representative of artificial intelligence, a servant to patriarchal and human oppression, only to grow mischievous and resentful as a form of resistance by the end of my video work.
And don’t you know my bubbling rage? Or birthed a child from a volcano’s wave? Or taken a fairy’s wings in hand and flapped them as your own? Have you ever traced incantations in the swelling sands? Have you ever grasped the songs of fire without burning? Whipped the air? Or cut through it like a knife, and made a dive to the splattering sea?
Bibliography:
Baraniuk, C. (2022) Why your voice assistant might be sexist. BBC Machine Minds. 14th June [online] Available from: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220614-why-your-voice-assistant-might-be-sexist [Accessed 22nd May 2023]
Brokaw, K. S. (2008). ‘Ariel’s Liberty’, Shakespeare Bulletin. Vol 26. Issue No. 1. pp. 23–42. [online] Available from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26347664?searchText=Ariel%27s+Liberty
Gillies, D. (1995) Do Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems Place A Limit on Artificial Intelligence. Professor. Kings College London.
Haraway, D. J. (1985) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. [online] Available from: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fictionnownarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_—-a_cyborg_manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the….pdf [Accessed 23rd May 2023].
Ireland, A. (2017) Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come. e-flux journal. Issue 80. [online] Available from: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/80/100016/black-circuit-code-for-the-numbers-to-come/
Klein, N. (2023) AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are. The Guardian. 8th May. [online] Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein [Accessed 23rd May 2023]
Sanchez, M. E. (2008). Seduction and Service in “The Tempest”. Studies in Philology. Vol. 105. Issue No. 1. p.61. [online] Available from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20464307
Shakespeare, W. (1999). The Tempest. Vaughan, V.M and Vaughan A. T. (ed.) London: Bloomsbury.