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• 1 2017-11-29T17:16:02-08:00 Ex Machina 31 The Uncanny Valley and The Cyborg Manifesto image_header 2017-12-07T11:33:28-08:00

  Ex Machina, a 2014 film about an artificial intelligence humanoid Ava, comes into close quarters within the valley and robots. The film focuses around Ava, an AI that has the body of a robot and the face of a human. Her human face is quite realistic because of its various facial expressions, use of make-up, and the overall appearance. Perhaps the biggest reason Ava evokes the uncanny expression is her body. Ava’s body is completely robotic: viewers can see the metallic metal in which she is made of, the different colors that are produced with the mechanics working, and the mixture of what is seen and maybe what is not. For instance, there are parts of Ava’s body that are translucent while she is naked and others that are not. Her feet are not made to be translucent and neither are any areas that can be sexualied like breasts or genitals, but viewers can see the mechanics in her stomach, neck, and thighs in motion. These clear areas allow viewers to see the machinery that makes Ava a robot; therefore allowing viewers to distinguish she is not human. One aspect of trying to decipher Ava's looks is explored in Lydia H. Liu's The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious in which she makes an effort to decipher the body of a cyborg: "Robots have been either built or conceived for future development" (Liu 1). This quote by Linda H. Liu suggests robots and cyborgs are built to perform specific futuristic tasks. Liu defines a robot as being "digital and is based upon the idea of communication networks of finite-state machines" (1). By claiming this, she is describing a robot as being purely digital can is created purely to work as a machine. In her definition of an automaton, Liu describes an automaton as "needing to rely on the mechanical principles of clockwork" (1). Humanoid Ava's body fits into this distinction because although her body and mind are digital, she still relies on mechanics and automaton to exist and interact with the real world among humans.

  The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.
   

  Not only does Ava look semi-human, she also acts very much like a human would. She craves attention, experiences emotion, is incredibly smart, and wants to experience the outside world. Ava falls into the uncanny valley dip because she is more humanistic than not through her looks, mannerisms, and overall personality. In effort to better describe the struggle between Ava being a cyborg or a human, Donna Haraway, author of Cyborg Manifesto, claims the “boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway 291). This can be noted for Ava because while viewers know she is not a human, sometimes there is a grapple to see the difference between artificial and reality. This battle then creates the feeling of uncanny because Ava’s entire existence creates an internal and external struggle on what is familiar and unfamiliar within the minds of viewers. On one hand, Ava seems to be quite familiar because she looks entirely human when she has clothes and human skin on, but when she takes the clothes and skin off and it is shown she is only a robot, she becomes unfamiliar.