The Flicker
The flicker. Created by the cut, but also the computer generated imagery of the morph. The android reaches their hand up to their ear, inputs a code, and flickers from white to black. They could said to be hacking the black and white binary. Yet this is more than a binary crossing, as they are flickering from a white artificial skin of plastic or metal, to a human brown skin of an african-american woman. The crossing is in multiple directions, and also includes a slight movement, a slight change of shape. The scene is quick, a few seconds at the beginning of the introductory video for Janelle Monae’s extensive three part concept album, Metropolis, a post-apocalyptic science fiction “emotion picture”. What is important here, though, is not the states before or after the flicker, but the ability to change color, to modulate visibility.