Ex Machina in the Garden

Abstract

Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2015) explores both long-standing discourses about artificial intelligence and more recent concerns about automation, surveillance, and big data. It does so by associating AI creation not solely with science, technology, and religion but also with the history of art and, more reflexively, with film itself. In this way, the film becomes an allegory for its own production, a story about representation and the creation of artificial film worlds by new technological means. This reflexivity underscores cinema's important role in popular discourses about technological change, a role it has long served as a “technocritical art.” AI films like Ex Machina suggest that this role is changing as film enters not just the digital age but also what W.J.T. Mitchell terms the age of biocybernetics.