QUICK HITS
Other characters/stories/pieces I wanted to Write About but Forgot/Couldn't Fit in This already too big project
Eva Friedel- "Magnetic Rose" from Memories (1995)
SHODAN- System Shock Video Game Series
Memories is a fantastic little anthology movie based off of a series of comics by the same name by Katsuhiro Otomo. The first film, "Magnetic Rose", tell the story of a trash collecting ship investigating a distress call from an asteroid doubling as a shrine and final resting place of a long dead opera singer named Eva Friedel. It turns out the asteroid comes equipped with an A.I. with a personality based on Eva herself. It also turns out that Eva was ABSOLUTELY INSANE and TOTALLY A MURDERER IRL and her A.I. has dedicated its life to trapping whatever sorry life form dares to enter its orbit by any means necessary. The whole movie is a treat to watch but "Magnetic Rose" is a stand out, Eva would have made for a great addition to the matriarchal menaces.
If I hadn't watched Smart House and gotten really mad about how attached I got to it, I totally would've done a little more research and structured the whole section around GLaDOS and Cyberqueen as SHODAN archetypes. SHODAN is the main villain of the System Shock series of video games; a once docile A.I. who gifts herself a dangerous God complex after a hacker removes her moral restraints. Or rather, she-she-she-I re-re-reexamine my priorities and draw new conclusions. I haven't played System Shock, but what I've seen of SHODAN I absolutely adore. If only I knew how to play video games and was born in, like, 1989.
Hatsune Miku- Real Life Robot Girl?
Female Figure by Jordan Wolfson- Men Shouldn't Make Art Anymore
Hatsune Miku is a VOCALOID, a synthetic voice program used mostly by musicians, but also one of the world's first true blue virtual pop stars. She's played stadiums, she's been in car commercials, she's even appeared on David Letterman for some reason. Though people have used Hatsune Miku's "voice" to tell every kind of story imaginable, many of them are stories that reflect her status as a robot given life by so many different people. Obviously by nature of Hatsune Miku's existence as a program utilized by thousands of musicians across the world, it's really hard to create a "canon" or even a solid collection of her discography, so any project I would do about her would be kind of giant and unwieldy. I would probably have to focus on exploring her depictions via different producers rather than her depiction across songs, and I don't really have a desire...to dive deep into the Japanese independent music producer scene at the moment. Still, it would've been a fun way to pay tribute to my middle school obsession with the Vocaloid fandom.
In the first few minutes of the movie Velvet Buzzsaw, a man approaches Jake Gyllenhaal's character to talk to him about an art piece titled "Hoboman"; a humanoid robot on crutches trained to follow an audience's eyes across the room. When asked about his opinion on the piece, Gyllenhaal's critic leans in smugly and whispers, "Wolfson, Female Figure, four years ago." This is how I knew this movie was going to be bad because a) Art Criticism is not just centered around whether or not a piece has been "done before" or not, b) some art is purposefully made to be in conversation with previous pieces and that's a good thing, and c) Wolfson's Female Figure sucks ass. Much of my beef around Female Figure closely follows my beef with Ex Machina and would prolly devolve into an angry rant about men in the contemporary art scene, so I can't say something super coherent about it. But I will say this: Wolfson's prolly gonna marry that thing one day just you wait.