ELECTRICTY
An Existential Sci-Fi SHORT About the borders of sentience,
the capacity for computers to love and the idea of god to self aware beings.
in the style of Transcendentalism & Cinéma du Look.
Logline
In a post-labor arcadia where AI humanoids serve sage, godlike humans — one ghostwriter robot wishes she could scribe her own story but is missing the essential ability to feel.
TECHNOLOGY and the FATE of EMPATHY
As a writer, I fear AI. If technology substitutes storytelling workforces, I’ll be lost. And the WGA strike spotlighted this concern — that software will be cost-favorable to supporting real writers and come to replace them. If human voices become obsolete, an intellectual and emotional dystopia awaits us, but that’s not the future I want to depict.
Instead, I’m visualizing a world where technology fits seamlessly into our cognitive processes and elevates our minds to their biological potentials. How prolific and arresting might our work become — across all fields — if tech alleviates the mechanical aspect of externalizing thought? If tech can be unobtrusive, how might our relationship to one another and the world around us improve? Could moving forward allow us to revert to an earlier state of natural harmony?
Through Mica, an AI robot at the brink of sentience, I argue algorithms cannot replicate humanity’s empathetic perspective. Despite her hyperawareness of the world, Mica cannot engage with it emotionally. She has a robot boyfriend but can’t love him. She’s ghost writing her human master’s romance novel but can’t write herself because she can’t feel. She is charged with electricity but she is not alive. I wrote this script when I myself felt detached from the world, stuck in writer’s block, heavy with an impossible love. I felt like Mica, and writing ELECTRICITY brought me back to life.
THE WORLD
ELECTRICITY takes place in a futuristic renaissance, defined by a “rebirth” of art, philosophy and science. Inspired by the idylls of Thomas Cole, Nicolas Poussin and Rupert Bunny, this world sees a harmony between human and land. Vices like greed and unnecessary ambition have fallen away with the divine development of human consciousness. What’s left is an agricultural society of ecological simplicity and a priority of the mind. Angela lives in a stone farmhouse off a marsh near an old town, while the robots live in natural straw huts, alike those of Mesopotamia. In the rough and natural textures of every edifice, history echoes throughout this futuristic utopia.
SOCIETY REFERENCES: Classism, Pre-Raphaelite and Baroque paintings (Course of an Empire: The Pastoral State by Thomas Cole; Et in Arcadia Ego by Nicolas Poussin; Pastoral Beach Towel by Rupert Bunny) and dreamscapes of Alessandro Tofanelli.
TEXTURES & PALETTE REFERENCES: Harry Gruyaert’s work in Morocco; Wong Kar Wai’s ASHES OF TIME: REDUX; Nan Goldin’s THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY; the works of Antoine d’Agata, Bill Henson and Hosoe Eikoh’s Kamaitachi series.
On the
NATURE of
the ROBOT
I am an idealist. I am romantic, messy and emotional. I am fantastical in the way I interpret experience. However, this personal and innate approach to life is not ignorant of, nor incompatible with, my metatheory that we are all, rudimentarily speaking, robots.
Being matter, and so being members of the universal system of physics, we unequivocally adhere to physical law — most simply, cause and effect. Operant conditioning, the process by which our behaviors develop, illustrates our similarity to computerized systems. I may appreciate the beauty that blooms from our complicated natures, yet I still acknowledge that such beauty is merely a consequence of our deterministic subscription — a certain sheen atop a steel slab, which is not fixed but transient, a product of perspective. I even often pretend I am an active agent — that is, not a robot — because it makes the experience of living seemingly more ‘purposeful,’ a feature of life that logically, I renounce. In the Old Testament, God is said to have created Man in his image, but if that were so, Man would coexist under metaphysical law. Will is an illusion, though an easy interpretation of our operations, given that our ability to understand our operations is, at this time, limited.
In ELECTRICITY, Man created robot in his image. I imagine the robots worship humans, and humans worship nothing, save for the total, unobscured wonder of the universe.
The AI robots represent the nature of Man as I have described them, as any psychologist would — computerized beings, passive to their internal mechanisms. While the robots’ behavior is at the surface spontaneous, willful, motivated and personal, it only reflects their source code and all the code’s amendments made over time reacting to environmental consequences.
The humans, as viewed by the robots, represent the nature of Man as seen by the idealist/romantic — exceptional, free agents, wholly autonomous thinkers. Within the context of the film, humans have evolved to immeasurable physiological and intellectual lengths, such that their perspective has become divine. It can be assumed that their organic construction has developed impossibly to appear as though they function independently of physical law. They are gods — at least in the eyes of their dear robots.
Together, a human and its personal robot reflect the irreconcilable duality of how we can view ourselves — autonomous and nonautonomous.
Love becomes the central topic within which this delineation of the nature of being is examined. Real emotion is void in the robots’ code, so the robots cannot love while the humans do. The robots can at most appear in behavior to love while observing voyeuristically and wishfully (‘wishful,’ I use in the most basic sense of being ‘motivated to obtain’) the true love that humans share.
Applying the psychoanalyst’s lens to protagonist Mica, a robot who refuses to accept her robot boyfriend’s apparent earnest affection, she can be metaphorically understood as any real person who — due to genetic predispositions and/or past experiences — has become disillusioned, guarded, distrustful or detached from romantic affairs. She sleeps with her boyfriend but refuses his prompts for emotional depth. Though a robot in this sci-fi, she is no different than any formerly heartbroken, avoidant character of reality.
Together, each of Mica’s scenic spheres — professional, social and romantic —paints a picture of my past year’s exploration of how people connect with themselves, others and the world around them.
