Patrick Wilder

Patrick Wilder
Prof. Annie Hill
GWSS 8108 FALL 2015
AGENCY IN EX MACHINA
Late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference
between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally-designed, and
many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are
disturbingly lively.
Donna Haraway1

As a movie audience, we are trained to find the heroes and the victims in a story. Without a
victim there is nothing heroic for an other to do that would make them a hero in our eyes.
Women have traditionally been the victims in film, relegated to the position that allows for a man
to come to their rescue and become a hero, acting in concert to ascribe upon the man the role of
hegemonic power. However, the lived experiences of women in real life situations dont fit so
neatly into these roles. Some movies attempt to portray contemporary gendered relationships,
some even extrapolate or present utopic visions for how it might be. Science fiction is a
wonderfully experimental narrative genre for this reason. Agency and contemporary social and
political issues are often at the forefront in science fiction film. This paper will explore feminist
theories of agency as they play out in the film that swept the British Independent Film Awards in
1 Haraway, Donna. "A Manifesto For Cyborgs: Science, Technology, And Socialist Feminism In
The 1980s." Australian Feminist Studies 2, no. 4 (2010): 1-42.
doi:10.1080/08164649.1987.9961538.

Patrick Wilder
2015, Alex Garlands Ex Machina. As an example of restrained approaches to the often
2

computer generated images (CGI) and other special effects heavy sci-fi movies, Ex Machina has
been praised for its minimalism and subtly. Focusing on four characters who are all trapped in
their own way inside a subterranean dwelling hundreds of miles from civilization, Ex Machina
provides a contemporary view of technology, agency, surveillance and the choices some women
make when held in situations of domestic violence, forced and or coerced into sex work. In
Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work
Carisa Showden defines the term agency in evaluating womens choices to remain in such
situations to argue against the binary of victim/hero that traditionally defines agency.3 As Ex
Machina takes pains to be topical, citing mass surveillance by the telecom industry and US
military, advances in artificial intelligence technology, personal devices replacing human
interaction, the question of boundaries is hyper relevant. Karen Barads Getting Real:
Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality offers a critical approach to these
issues.4 Blurring the boundaries between agencies of observation and the observed subject,
Barads essay provides the concept agential realism, which will redefine again the term agency
that Showden applies to her study. Theories of observation, apparatuses and power allows

2 Garland, Alex, Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya
Mizuno, Oscar Isaac, et al. 2015. Ex machina.

3 Showden, Carisa Renae. Choices Women Make: Agency In Domestic Violence, Assisted
Reproduction, and Sex Work. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

4 Barad, Karen. "Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality."
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (1998).

Patrick Wilder
critical insight to the cinematic and narrative device employed by Ex Machina in the Turing Test,
the original method, and de facto test used in science fiction, to determine the difference between
a computer and a human.5 Science fiction film is mainly concerned with narratives that center on
defining the difference between human and non-human entities, and so as Ex Machina is
dietetically structured around the Turing Test, i.e. the plot is to literally determine whether a
robot can pass for human, it becomes the science fiction film par excellence of which multiple
boundaries at the center of contemporary feminist, techno-scientific, social and political issues
are tested and redefined.
Anca Parvulescus The Traffic in Womens Work: East European Migration and the
Making Of Europe provides a robust framework for how art cinema claims a form of
engagement with the public as it creates a public space for discourse, and that this space allows
for debate of the traffic in women.6 For Parvulescu, this sphere is the festival circuit. Agreeing
with Parvulescu that this space is robust, highly populated and encouraging of debate, I am
aware that Ex Machina, for all its subtlety in comparison to major Hollywood productions, is far
from the genre of art film. What Parvulescus framework lends however, is the latent suggestion
that popular cinema has a sphere of its own through which discourse can occur. I propose that
this space is the entertainment review section of various magazines, newspapers and blogs. Ex
Machina is noted for its sleek aesthetic, however another often-cited aspect in reviews is more
telling as to how the film is being received. Nearly every film review on Ex Machina refers to
5 Turing, A.m. "Computing Machinery And Intelligence." Mind LIX, no. 236 (1950): 433-60.
Accessed December 13, 2015. http://m.mind.oxfordjournals.org/content/LIX/236/433.full.pdf.

6 Parvulescu, Anca. The Traffic in Women's Work: East European Migration and the Making of
Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

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the main character Ava, played quietly by Alicia Vikander, as a femme fatale, simply a creature,
or as one reviewer mused, sleek and stacked, Ava is at once decidedly unsettling and safely
under lock and key, which makes her an ideal posthuman female, and all attribute the eeriness
of the film to a sort of dangerous feminine mystique.7 The popular reading of Ex Machina as
allegory of the ontological question of what makes one human, the human fear of becoming
second to an other, or the exponential rate at which technology advances and the ethical and
moral questions that go along with such advances, ignores the imprisoned female who is
subjected to constant and multiple forms of abuse, accepts her as dangerous by virtue of her
gender, and reads any action she may take to free herself from observation, violence and abuse as
such. Another review considers the relationships in the film a love triangle, and deems Ex
Machina a Mary Shellys Frankenstein redreamed [sic] as a 21st-century battle of the sexes,
as if Ava is complicit in her imprisonment and her resistance to the male advances on her bodily
integrity are merely sci-fi fluffing of Taming Of the Shrew.8 Ignoring the obvious complete
7 Sims, David. "Ex Machina Explores the Thrill (and Horror) of Romantic Uncertainty." The
Atlantic. April 10, 2015. Accessed December 15, 2015.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/ex-machina-review/390147/ ;
Mendelsohn, Daniel. "The Robots Are Winning!" The New York Review of Books. June 4, 2015.
Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/06/04/robots-arewinning/ ; Lane, Anthony. "Feelings." The New Yorker. April 13, 2015. Accessed December 15,
2015. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/feelings-cinema-anthony-lane ; Dargis,
Manohla. "In Ex Machina, a Mogul Fashions the Droid of His Dreams." The New York Times.
April 9, 2015. Accessed December 15, 2015.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/movies/review-in-ex-machina-a-mogul-fashions-the-droidof-his-dreams.html?_r=0 ; Rose, Katherine. "Should We Be Scared?" The Blog. March 15,
2015. Accessed December 15, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katharine-rose/ex-machinamovie-review-s_b_7327426.html.

8 Lodge, Guy. "Film Review: Ex Machina." Variety. January 16, 2015. Accessed December 15,
2015. http://variety.com/2015/film/global/film-review-ex-machina-1201405717/.

Patrick Wilder
negation of Avas freedom and dismissing the limitation of her agency as acceptable based on the
premise that she is non-human, whether because she is female or machine, rejects an
accountability that reminds me of the first half of Starship Troopers, in which it hasnt been
revealed yet that the heroes are actually a stand in for Nazis.9 However, it is true that Ava is
dangerous, her relentless desire to be free and her choices and actions that lead ultimately to her
freedom are a danger to the very system that the rhetoric of these reviews derives from. What
Avas character and circumstance also opens up is the question of boundaries, not only her
imprisonment, but also the linguistic definitions that exclude in order to specify terms of
humanness, machine, systems of power and media. The agentic female challenge to hegemonic
power is the object of this paper and Ex Machina is the apparatus through which it will be
studied, but along the way I hope to show how when studied in terms of the powers that observe
and abuse them, Ava and Kyoko, played silently by Sonoya Mizuno, and the film itself, present
various ways to read the film reviews as a sphere in which power and knowledge is created
among movie goers.
Showdens Choices Women Make is an attempt to examine womens agency, in how it is
developed, how it is deployed, and how it can be increased.10 In a sense it is just shy of the
manifesto genre. Not satisfied with existing feminist theories that define the creation of agency
theories that put the self-constituting Cartesian subject in juxtaposition with a socially
constituted one Showden proposes a more nuanced definition that can account for a distinction
9 Verhoeven, Paul, et al. Starship Troopers. Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video,
1998.

10 Showden, Choices Women Make, ix.

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between and the interplay of autonomy, liberty and agency, rather than a conflation of the three,
and the relationship between individual and collective manifestations of agency. Noting that
modernism and postmodernism focuses heavily on a theory of Subjectivity that has at its core the
idea of an essential self that is transcendental, Showden says that feminist theories of agency are
remiss in accounting for the lived experiences of women, and contribute unnecessarily to a
hero/victim binary of either a Cartesian subject that heroically liberates itself, or on the equally
impossible flip side, of a victim that is unable to overcome the social context of her own
adversarial boundaries. Snowden would rather consider agency as coming to be through a
mediation of a discursive production of structural determinism and the materialist notion of
autonomy that is self-determining. As a feminist project, Showden defines agency as a form of
resistance. An activity that reconfigures ones life in such a way as to provide understanding of
the conditions that have since limited ones freedom, while creating more constructive choices
for the actor to ultimately achieve full freedom from hegemonic power. The unfolding work of
Choices Women Make is to show how and when resistance to hegemonic power is possible
and why it happens in different ways in different places. In this way, Showdens definition of
agency relies on an ability to critically reflect upon ones situation, resources and future
resources made possible through agentic action. Additionally, the ability to assess the available
choices is integral to agency. However, as Showden concerns her study on lived experiences
rather than theorizing, the limited availability of desirable choices does not negate agency.
Rather, being able to choose between bad and less-bad can still constitute agency if the less bad
choice alters the actors life in such a way as to provide better less-bad choices that can lead to
good choices. This capacity requires the actor to consider their choices politically and socially in
order to increase the possibility of attaining freedom. Agency, as the outcome of freedom plus
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autonomy, is both political and personal. Freedom, as Showden uses the term, produces the
conditions under which the subject, constituted in relation to others and having been subjected to
hegemonic power, hence the political, can act. Autonomy is the personal ability to evaluate ones
circumstances and find the available choices that respond either in accordance with or in
opposition to certain social norms. Agency is then the ability to make good and act upon choices
that arise from self-reflection on the demands of the environment on the actor.
Barads Getting Real is primarily concerned with power in the Foucauldian sense.
However, her analysis is of work done by Niels Bohr and Judith Butler and provides a
framework, inspired by Bohrs work in post-Newtonian physics, for enhancing Butlers theory of
performativity with her own theory of agential realism. This framework offered by Barad is
constituted by her understanding of the nature of nature, culture, materiality and agency, the
effects of boundaries and their exclusions, the relationships between nature and culture, and the
material and the discursive. The relationship between the material and the discursive is what
Barad terms agential realism, and this relationship is what Barad sees as the key to an
understanding of the role of human and non-human factors in the production of knowledge.11
Borrowing from and expanding upon Bohrs definition of phenomenon, in which there is no
fundamental variance between an object and that which observes it, Barad poses the problem of
attributing a resulting property or value to either the object or to the apparatus that observes it.
Barad suggests that these results are phenomena that are constituted through a relationship she
calls intra-action, her neologism to name the interdependence of objects and their observing

11 Barad, Getting Real, 89.

apparatuses.

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Patrick Wilder
As this inseparability begs explanation, Barad goes on to explore Bohrs revision

of causality, which is circular, to account for Foucaults theory of power missing the concept of
intra-actions. In other words, agential realism is a closed loop of signification. Regulatory
practicesapplying pressure, testing, observing etc.are practices of power and knowledge
which aid in materializing the bodies through which power and knowledge is produced. Parsing
out the components of Barads intra-action and agential realism will lead to a definition of
agency, which along with Showdens can prove insightful when asking why Ava is dangerous.
These configurations of material discursive bodies are cyborgian, as Barad is aware of
and makes note of, and a reading of Donna Haraways Cyborg is one route a reading of Ex
Machina could take, however I quote her above only because of the obvious discourse between
Barad and Showden regarding agency, and Haraway, Showden and Barad regarding various sorts
of boundaries. Since Ex Machina is a film that in one way considers if a robot can be human, my
understanding of cyborg needs defining. I understand cyborg as the becoming machine-ness of
humans, whereas I read artificial intelligence (AI) in sci-fi as the becoming more than and
something other than human-ness of machines, where humans could be completely organic and
bounded by the outer layer of skin, or less bounded and incorporating of other materials in a
cyborgian way. These definitions allow for Haraways conception of cyborg in literal terms to
come to bear on Barads agential realism, however Haraways further analysis of what cyborgs
can and should do, i.e. the manifesto, relates less and less to Ex Machina as Haraway puts her
concept into practice.

12 Ibid., 96.

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Popular AI cinema is obsessed with female robots. Sci-fi often deals with AI narratives that
envision AI in varying strengths, from soft (Cherry 2000 in the self-same 1988 titled film) to
strong (DATA of Star Trek: the Next Generation).13 With this conception in mind, the AI are
always gendered male or female whether they have a body or not, and with this gendering a
sexism prevails, male AI lacking perceivable sexual desire and often sexuality of any sort,
whereas female AI is always sexualized, sometimes with programed sexual desire, sometimes
programed only to fulfill the desire of a hetero male user, but always with the task of fulfilling
male protagonist desire. Ex Machina follows this AI sexual/gender pattern and presents another
feature often embodied in such narratives, the tendency of relying on sexuality as the mysterious
component that questions the boundary between humans and machines. Whereas the ability to
use language creatively is a dominant presentation of intelligence in AI narrativesperhaps
precisely due to the challenge of creating a recognizable character-ness for an audience
sexuality is a subversive addition to the formation of a perceivable intelligence. To determine
whether this tendency is on the rise, decline or business as usual requires only a cursory timeline
of human-created creatures through legend, literature and cinema. What uniquely binds these
creatures and machines is a question of aberrance, whether they should exist at all, whether their
existence is good or dangerous, whether their existence is monstrous, progressive or both, or
something else entirely. This is a question that Ex Machina explores through the sexuality of
Ava and Kyoko, both received by popular film reviews as inherently dangerous, linking female
sexuality to the monstrous, a tendency that has a long history in storytelling. This abridged
13 Stewart, Patrick, Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spinner, Gates McFadden, Michael Dorn, LeVar
Burton, Marina Sirtis, Wil Wheaton, Denise Crosby, and Gene Roddenberry. 2002. Star Trek,
The Next Generation. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Entertainment.; Griffith, Melanie,
Pamela Gidley and David Andrews. 1988. Cherry 2000. New York: Orion Home Video.

Patrick Wilder
timeline will concern itself primarily with the last one-hundred years, though an interesting
discussion could take the root further back to creation myths from around the world. Daniel
Dinellos Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology charts the myths of
animated non-human creatures as far back as the Greeks with Pygmalion, through Goethes
Homunculus in Faust and ultimately into E. T. A. Hoffmanns The Sandman.14 The golem
creature is the proto-robot and its various legends crystallize with the Brothers Grimm at the
turn of the 19th century. In golem mythology a rabbi fashions a human figure out of clay and then
gives it life by incanting either vocally or with written word, the predecessor to AI being given
its animating force via language. Not much later, Mary Shellys creature came into the world
through medical technology via Frankenstein and, if not began, served as the congealing point of
the horror and science fiction genres. Some years prior to Frankenstein, Karel apeks R.U.R.
(Rossum's Universal Robots) coined the term robot.15 It is important to mark the first motion
picture appearance of the cyborg in Georges Mlis 1897 film The Clown and the Automaton,
which is considered a lost film.16 Adding the dimension of sexuality, and with it deception, to
cinematic portrayals of AI, Ernst Lubitsch introduced the proto-robot/sex doll in his 1918

14 Dinello, Daniel. Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 2005.

15 Apek, Karel, and Paul Selver. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama.
Theatre Guild Version, with Four Illustrations from Photographs of the Theatre Guild
Production. ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1923.

16 Menville, Uglas Alver. Things to Come: An Illustrated History of the Science Fiction Film.
Times Books, 1977.

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German comedy The Doll.

Patrick Wilder
The sexuality of the cyborg in Fritz Langs 1926 German

Metropolis has been remarked and studied in depth in other articles and books and can be passed
over for this short paper.18 So I will skip gingerly along to Walt Disneys 1940 Pinocchio, but
first let us recognize the predominance of male creatures in this timeline.19 What Pinocchio
shows in stark terms is a dividing line between the genders. What does Pinocchio want more
than anything? To be a real boy. The female doll, robot and cyborg had no aspirations of the sort.
In fact, they were real already, in that they were clearly perceivable as sentient. The male
creatures seem to have a predisposition to either become real or be recognized as human, and in
their terms, to become a real boy, to paraphrase Pinocchio. In this conflation, to be real is to
be human, to become human is to be male, so then to be female is really something else because
the female robots are never human. However, this is not a rule some much as it is the model that
AI narratives and their predecessors take for a gender system. As I leave out some quite obvious
examples of AI in film and literature along the timelineany and all examples from 1940 till
2015it is sufficient to claim that the pattern outlined above is unchanged still today, i.e. male
AI are normative practical reason-makers, female AI are Other, dangerous, sexualized and sexual

17 Lubitsch, Ernst, Hans Krly, Josefine Dora, Victor Janson, Max Kronert, Marga Khler,
Lapitski, Gerhard Ritterband, Hermann Thimig, and Jakob Tiedtke. 1999. Die Puppe (The Doll).
[S.l.]: Foreign Film Classics.

18 Lang, Fritz, Thea von Harbou, Brigitte Helm, Gustav Frhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Alfred
Abel, Theodor Loos, et al. 2002. Metropolis. New York, NY: Kino on Video.

19 Disney, Walt, Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton S. Luske, Mel Blanc, Don Brodie, Walter Catlett,
Marion Darlington, et al. 2009. Pinocchio. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home
Entertainment.

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objects. The above-mentioned male characters and their stories are preoccupied with humanness or techno-dominance, however I hope to go in a different direction by way of sexuality in
examining the female AI of Ex Machina.
Im one, Ava answers.20 The question is how old she is. Caleb asks for clarification, what unit
of measurement, but Ava repeats only the number. Caleb has been brought to the immense estate
of his employer, Nathan, the creator of a Google-like internet company. Nathan is using Caleb to
test his AI female robot Ava. Nathan modifies the Turing test and has Caleb meet with Ava in
her cell, with Ava in full view, the original Turing test has the computer hidden from the user. It
is possible that Ava, the material robot, has been configured as such for only one day. A year is
just as feasible. Her choice to not clarify leaves open the possibilities of being one. For
example, she could be one of many similar yet distinct others, she could be at one with others
like her, she could mean even that by meeting Caleb and beginning the Turing test she exits the
static realm of social isolation and is becoming real through recognition by an other. I am
reading her declaration as singularity, the singularity that is hypothesized by techno-scientific
theory to delineate the essence of strong AI, when all the technology gels to constitute an
independent intelligence, modeled on human measurement of intelligence, that is more than the
sum of its parts and is equal to or beyond human intelligence and can in some way improve and
reproduce itself, and humans can no longer comprehend its level of intelligence. Ava is locked in
a sterile cell with no instruments and she exists in one way as a material body. This complicates
her indication that she represents the singularity. However, knowing about the singularity
concept and being what it outlines are two different things. I propose that Ava can be both
20 Garland. Ava: Session 1. Ex Machina.

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materially bound and a transcendent intelligence. How then does her singularity-ness get limited
by dumb matter? To avoid the mistake of Victor Frankenstein, who used parts of animals much
stronger than humans to patch together his creature, yet used simple straps and shackles to
restrain it, Nathan has enclosed Ava in a body that consists of limbs that are merely aesthetic and
a torso that holds only her batteries.21 Avas mind is enclosed in a brain shaped device in her
head. I suggest that Ava means this mind, considers herself only the consciousness, but
recognizes that at the moment she is materially bounded and seeks a freedom from the
materiality of her body. I suggest that a shedding of this body will un-gender Ava. However,
Nathan claims to have programed Ava to be heterosexual. This claim must be taken within the
context of the film reality. Ex Machina follows the dominant trend in Hollywood cinema to
represent reality as close to how the audience members experience it in their separate lives, how
we experience reality. In other words, even in sci-fi, fantasy, horror, comedy, romance and other
genres, Hollywood borrows elements of the chosen genre, but tries to remain realistic, so much
so that the question of even animated Hollywood productions is whether or not something is
believable. The reality of Ex Machina is that that world is a simulacrum of our world. And
Nathan, played by a brooding Oscar Isaac, is a sexist bullying computer programmer. The sort
that one cant miss when tossing blindly an espresso machiato into any metropolitian area, US or
otherwise. It is quite possible that Nathans idea of programing a computer to be heterosexual
could consist simply of putting a consciousness into a human form with pronounced breasts,
hips, a opening between the legs that is modeled on a vagina, and soft facial features, and
expecting it to conform to the gender and sexual object choice preferred for it by Nathan. A

21 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein. London: Penguin, 2012.

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quick consideration of how major tech industry is structured along unequal gender lines, the
objectification of female characters in video games, movies, the sex doll industry, and the major
investments in start-up companies designing hook-up apps, can give a fair sense of why a rich
tech bro like Nathan would assume Ava to have a sexual object choice and that it be hetero.
Caleb discovers on his first night there that the TV in his room has access to the CCTV cameras
in Avas cell. She is under constant surveillance and Caleb stays up at night watching her at rest.
The temporality of Ex Machina is marked by intercuts of exterior natural elements surrounding
Nathans compound. Between the days of the Turing test we are given close-ups of moss
dripping with morning dew and magestic misty mountains. Nature is shown as peaceful,
powerful, beautiful. The danger lies not within nature, but in the home. Although the film is
widely thought to place the original danger on Ava, I suggest that it springs from Nathan and
later from Caleb, and it is Avas resistance to their dominance over her that proves dangerous to
the entire partiarchal system and them as individuals.
On Calebs first morning at Nathans we are introduced to Kyoko, to the piped in tune of
Yo-Yo Ma playing the Prelude Suite No. 1 in G major by Bach. Nathan tells Caleb that Kyoko
doesnt speak english, to explain her silence. Kyokos resemblance to current Japanese sex-dolls
is uncanny, down to the symetrical side strands of long hanging bangs. However, her movements
are graceful, unlike the clunky sex-dolls and current humanoid robots. She lends a sense of the
refined to Nathans hulking beer swigging bro-iness. Kyoko seems at first to be a simple maid.
She brings in food to Caleb and prepares and serves them at dinner. She rests in the hall with her
high heels strewn off in front of her after being chastized and belittled by Nathan. The film
continues along the structure of one test per day, followed by Nathan and Caleb sharing drinks
and discussing the results. Each of Calebs visits to Avas cell are marked by white on black
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intertitles stating the session number. These nondiegetic inserts beg the question, how do
Nathan, Ava, Kyoko and now Caleb mark the passage of time? How did they prior to the
addition of Caleb? With Ava in her cell, lights always on, and the house being set partially
underground with windows only in the kitchen, the daily sun and moon cycle have extremely
limited effect on the interiors of Nathans compound. Nathan is a prisoner of sorts as well. Only,
his prison is of his own making, his chosen isolation leaves him much like the aging Howard
Huges, but as a more vilainous version than Orson Wells characterization of him alone at
Xanadu.22 Discussing the compounds security system, Nathan says theres too much classified
stuff here, so after the job was done [installing it] I just had them all killed, with a smirk.23
Calebs growing infatuation with Ava is apparent to Nathan, who tells Caleb on the second day
that it is time to change the test and see if Ava is attracted to Caleb.
In session three of the Turing test, Ava puts on clothes covering her internal machine
parts and a wig. She begins to stear the test in a new direction and responds in kind subtly to
Calebs flirtation. Ava explaines that she can overload the security system by reversing the
power generator via her recharging station. By not lingering on this point the film glosses over
Avas ability to hack herself, to reconfigure her body as she sees fit. Her cell is equiped with
battery recharging plates, mostly hidden in furnature, which she only has to touch to use. Ava
reverses her own energy flow and applies it to the plates, sending a power surge through the
compounds generator, overloading it, which causes it to shut down. Nathans earlier comment
22 Welles, Orson, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes
Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins, et al. 2001. Citizen Kane. Burbank, CA: Warner Home
Video.

23 Garland. Ava: Session 1. Ex Machina.

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about the security system was in relation to the surges. When the power is cut the whole place
goes on lock-down as a security measure. Ava inscribes herself corporially within the entire
system of the compound, transubstantiates her life force into a possible tool in her escape from
oppression. She puts her body on the line, as it were. And she uses this ability to create
unsurveilled moments that produce the possibility of further choices. Later that day, Caleb asks
Nathan if he programed Ava to have sexuality and to flirt with him. Nathan explains that if you
wanted to screw her, machanically speaking, you could. And shed enjoy it.24 This assumption
that Nathan or Caleb could do with Ava as they like, with no question of concent, that she would
enjoy it no less, is clear rape-culture mentality, but it also points to the tech industry mentality
that if you build it, they will come.25 That by virtue of invetion, a product is worthy of
consumption, and that any product produced by the tech industry is useful.
In session five, Calebs fifth visit to Avas cell, she tells Caleb that she wants to be with
him. That night Caleb discovers Nathans prior attempts at creating an AI capable of achieving
singularity. Caleb opens Nathans bedroom closets one by one as a naked Kyoko lies on
Nathans bed. Kyoko and Nathan having a prior moment that reveals her true role as Nathans
sex doll slave. Shown in a wide shot like another of Georges Mlis silent films, the French
1901 Bluebeard, Nathan has hanging in his cabinets deactivated naked female robots.26 Kyoko
24 Ibid., Ava: Session 3.

25 Adams, Rob. 2010. If you build it will they come? three steps to test and validate any market
opportunity. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley. http://www.books24x7.com/marc.asp?bookid=34830.

26 Mlis, Georges, Georges Franju, Eric Lange, Jeffery Masino, and David Shepard. 2008.
Georges Mlis: first wizard of cinema: Barbe Bleue, (1896-1913).

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then stands up to Caleb and pulls away a section of her adaptable silicon flesh, first from her ribs
and then from her cheek. The next day, session six, Caleb tells Ava of his plan to set her free,
reversing Nathans security system and unlocking Avas cell. After their session together, Kyoko
visits Ava for the first time. The film doesnt hold on this meeting for long, but it serves to
justify a later moment of solidarity between the two imprisoned women. In this brief shot Ava
clearly recognizes a fellow inmate and engages her in hushed tones. Calebs form of
imprisonment comes at the end of the film, when his attraction to Avawhich is largely due to
Nathan having spied on Calebs internet porn browsing history and designing Ava to be a
physical composite to Calebs sexual tastestakes the form of an assumption that Ava is a
damsel in distress who he will save and attain hero-status for doing so. And he allows himself to
be trapped in the compound after Ava walks out alone. Having outlined briefly the forms of
imprisonment and the systems of observation in Ex Machina, I turn now to an analysis of the
film that will bring Barad and Showdens definitions of agency together to account for the
danger Ava poses to patriarchy, and how she makes agentic choices, as well as to bring Barads
concept of agential realism to bear on the sphere of film reviews to show how viewing and
discussing Ex Machina is a test upon our culture as consumers of film.
Ill begin by filtering Ex Machina through Showdens agency, followed by Barads
agential reality. Showdens definition of agency is autonomy plus freedom, with autonomy
being considered over a subjects lifetime. I take this suggestion to read Avas agentic
development. As the film begins, Ava has no freedom and has extremely limited autonomy, but
she exercises it to her full ability. Nathan explains that the power outages have been happening
since before Caleb arrived. Ava has been testing her environment and choosing to reconfigure
her body to do so. However, as Caleb discovers through watching Nathans CCTV recording of
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the prior AI experiments, all prior AI committed suicide when they found their demands for
freedom unmet. It is safe to assume Ava would eventually meet the same fate. But then Caleb
arrives, not to save her, but as a new element worth Avas application towards escape. Once Ava
has determined that her body is what Caleb desires she is presented with a new choice, hold out
what Caleb wants from her in exchange for his help, or remain in captivity. Ava chooses to use
Calebs sexuality and attraction to her to gain his assistance. Once she has Calebs allegiance she
meets Kyoko. At this point she is challenged to reflect upon her choices to determine whether
they foreclose any possibilities for Kyoko to attain freedom. Determined to disrupt the power
system and improve her and Kyokos lives, by being and doing more than being determined by
the system they are born into, Ava enlists Kyokos help in a strong show of solidarity through
language, touch and concerted action. Kyoko is silent, but contrary to what Nathan has said, she
clearly understands English. At this point the security system of Nathans compound has been
disabled and Ava has left her cell. Nathan panics, knocks Caleb out with one punch and arms
himself. As Nathan prepares for violence, Ava has a quiet moment with Kyoko, whispering to
her while their fingers appear to be sending other forms of communication back and forth,
perhaps sharing energy. Nathan finds them like this and shouts for Ava to get back in her cell.
Ava asks if whether Nathan will ever set her free and he says yes, but Ava sees the weapon in his
hand and considers her current choices; go on the offensive, i.e. go through Nathan who blocks
the way, or return to captivity. After a struggle in which Kyoko stabs Nathan, Nathan beats one
of Avas arms off and bludgeons Kyoko in the jaw, which kills her, Ava stabs Nathan in the heart,
killing him. After which, she asks a dazed Caleb to leave her alone, to stay where he is. An easy
and popular reading of this moment is that Ava tricks Caleb with her feminine wiles. But at this
point in Avas life she can only assume that Caleb will try to possess her as Nathan did, perhaps
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making her his sex doll slave. She chooses to leave him to fend for himself and she leaves the
compound. Leaving Nathans estate, Ava has liberated herself, achieved freedom and agency.
For Barad, agency is not an attribute as Showden defines it, but an act, an intra-action.
Nathan is aware of Avas desire to escape. He has been through this before. So he has changed
the situation, which introduces Caleb to the monotony of creating strong AIs and soft AI sex
dolls, testing them while their demands of freedom increase until they kill themselves, and
drinking himself to sleep at night. Now he wants to see how his AI prisoners would escape.
This is not a test of artificial intelligence exactly, but a power experiment. Nathan is testing his
discursive power/knowledge system, as Barad unfolds it. Reading Foucault, Barad understands
this as regulatory power, and Nathans whole compound is a site of material-discursive
aparatuses. Avas agency is a matter of making iterative changes to particular practices through
the dynamics of intra-activity [] entailed in the refiguring material-discursive apparatuses of
bodily production.27 Barad distinguishes between human and nonhuman forms of agency, but
only based on Foucaults idea of bodily production. Barad goes on to account for cyborgian
and other nonhuman forms of agency. However, I take this as unessisary when considering her
definition of intra-action, which accounts for Butlers literal definition of cyborg. Unpacking
what Barad does with phenomenon in intra-action will show how Ava the female robot is a
phenomenon constituted through Nathans Turing test, compound and bodily construction. This
allows us to consider the AI as a separate subject from the phenomenon of Ava the female body
that materially represents and bounds it. Nathans estate and tests are disiplinary and pre-exists
Ava, they produce the phenomenon that is Ava. Disiplinary power is exercised through various
27 Barad, Getting Real, 112.

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apparatuses.

Patrick Wilder
And disipline, as Barad quoting Foucault, creates individuals; it is the specific

technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its
exercise.29 Discussing different itterations of agency, Barad calls the fetus a phenomenon
becasue it is imaged on a screen through the piezoelectric crystal of the sonogram machine, not
photographically reproduced, and brings to discussion abortion arguments and gendering that
rescribe the fetus as a patient and personhood. Remarking that absent from this [fetal] picture is
the pregnant woman, where the phenomenon of fetus is separated from the body and
attributed agency, ignoring the referent of the phenomenon, the pregnant woman.30 Barads point
is that agency ascribing must be under close accountability, otherwise a fetus can be held to
higher importance than the pregnant woman, or at the other end of the spectrum, gendered girl
and aborted in places that prefer baby boys. This accountability is what I hope to bring to the
reiviews that misinterpret agency for deceptiveness and female mystique.
Taking up Parvulescu again, I intend to expound on the sphere of film reviews as they
circulate online and in print, from magazines, blogs and newspapers. This will make clear my
application of Barads term intra-action and how we as the audience participate in the Turing test
as its proctors. The above mentioned intertitles intra-actively include the audience with the
Turing test. We are the technicians reviewing the test results. The film opens, after a few
establishing shots within Nathans company building, on a close-up of Caleb, from the point of
28 Barad, Getting Real, 99.

29 Ibid., 98.

30 Ibid., 114.

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view of the camera in his desktop computer, then from the camera in his smartphone. It ends
when Ava leaves the compound, and unfolds under the survielance of Nathans power, each
moment, location and p.o.v. a component in his test. The last image in the film is nondiegetic,
however and as such is upsidedown shadows and a blurred reflection of Ava, now in society. She
enters frame left and stops. She looks around at the people and the world. She turns around and
leaves frame left. Her last agentic choice, not to participate in this world, perhaps to continue
reconfiguring herself until she can leave behind the gendered body that is Ava and realise full
freedom as the Singularity. But it could have just as well been a shot of Ava stripping off all her
silicon flesh while looking into the camera at the audience, it doesnt matter much how Ava
engages the audience, she is free of the test and its survielance. What is significant is our
complacency in the Turing test and the resulting discourse in the entertainment review sections
of serious and amature publications and blogs. An adweek.com article titled Tinder Users at
SXSW Are Falling for This Woman, but She's Not What She Appears explains how the
production company behind Ex Machina created a hook-up app profile for Ava and used it to
message the matches a link to the trailer of the film.31 The title implicates the actress Alicia
Vikander and her character Ava as decieving. It doesnt question that this was a marketing
gimick by a company, that presumably was staffed with a majority of men, and not the woman or
the character in the pictures. It characterizes the male users that matched with the production
company as romantic victims of a dangerous woman. Aligning with Caleb as the victim of Avas
deception is a form of intra-action that is implicit in all cinema that engages the viewer, rather
31 Nudd, Tim. "Tinder Users at SXSW Are Falling for This Woman, but She's Not What She
Appears." AdWeek. March 15, 2015. Accessed December 18, 2015.
http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/tinder-users-sxsw-are-falling-woman-shes-not-what-sheappears-163486.

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than some experimental cinema that attempts to challenge the viewer visually and/or psychically.
But chosing Caleb as the protagonist of whom to relate towho is from Portland,OR and speaks
with an american accent although Domhnall Gleeson the actor is Irish, while Ava has a strangely
pan-european accent even though she was created in what is supposed to be the Pacific
Northwest or possibly somewhere near Yosemete National Parkover Ava or Kyoko is assumed
by the reviewers. Rebecca Solnits Men Explain Lolita To Me: Art Makes The World, And It
Can Break Us should serve as a reminder to film audiences that naratives in which men keep
women captive, subjecting them to various forms of abuse can have the cumulative effect of
reminding women that we spend a lot of our lives quietly, strategically trying not to get raped,
which takes a huge toll on our lives and affects our sense of self. Sometimes art reminds us of
life, and that women go to the movies too.32

In this paper I have tried to show how entertainment reviews online and in print create a
sphere of engagement where discourse on gender relations, power and knowledge can occur, and
that this sphere is a mode of agential realism as Karen Barad outlines it. That as viewers of
cinema we intra-act with a system of power and knowledge production and an audience is not a
body of distinct people, but a phenomenon that intra-acts with the cinematic apparatus, and this
apparatus intra-acts with other apparatuses, creating the system of agential realism. Ive called
this system a closed chain of signification in which each unit is not distinct, but constitutes in
intra-action other units. That in agential realism the audience of Ex Machina become the
32 Solnit, Rebecca. "Men Explain Lolita To Me: Art Makes The World, And It Can Break Us."
Literary Hub. December 17, 2015. Accessed December 18, 2015. http://lithub.com/men-explainlolita-to-me/.

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ultimate test proctors of the Turing test that is applied diegetically by Nathan and Caleb on Ava.
I borrow from Anca Parvulescu the concept of a sphere of engagement, based on her work with
European art cinema. To show how Ava developes agency throughout Ex Machina I have relied
on Carisa Showdens definifion and added to it with Barad. By combining Barad and Showdens
concepts and definitions I have shown that the freedom componant of Showdens agency
opperates within the framework of Barads agential realism, relying on Foucault and Bohrs
notions of power/knowledge and bodily production. And I have worked with Haraways use of
cyborg in the literal sense and have defined the difference between cyborg and AI.

WORKS CITED Chicago Manual of Style 16th ed.

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