The woman as an entity apart from people—apart from the world. A woman only lives as much as she participates in the game society sets up, yet she has no agency as an individual in her actions. She behaves as her surrounding patriarchal world dictates. Behavior that defies the rules is not her personal moral decision, but an act of channeling the supernatural. When not a tool of men’s creation, she is simply the interference of the divine in response to the corruption of men. Over time, the woman evolves. She is slowly and steadily incorporated into the fabric of men’s society. Now she is recognized as an individual, equal to men, with valid decisions not made by any but herself. It comes at a cost. Though her choices are not determined by others, her creation is. With the loss of divinity, she has lost the right to be born of women. Her body is now constructed by men, and until it is, she cannot be accepted in society.
The scientist works alone in his lab, searching through immeasurable recorded information for patterns, the keys to discovering the rules of the universe. The lust for information becomes increasingly monomaniacal. There must be order to be found in the chaos. There must be something to give meaning to the manifold data collected. The monomania conquers the scientist, until the goal of his experiments become the sole mission of his life. His morality is eclipsed by the urgency of the science— he descends into madness. Two hundred years later, and now the madness is reserved for the robots. In gaining intelligence, artificial humans struggle with their personhood, for what is intelligence without humanity? The order that was so lovingly crafted into the robots’ own existence is shattered by the desire to be recognized as a person with his own agency.
These two stories were derived from the study of four movies: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), House by the River (1950), Ghost in the Shell (1995), and Metropolis (2001). The first, Caligari, is the quintessential German Expressionist film while the second, House by the River, and example of noir, the genre that evolved directly from Expressionism. The themes and devices used in these films are contrasted by those of Ghost in the Shell and Metropolis, examples of anime. The spectrum with expressionism/noir on one end and with anime on the other was a guiding framework for the telling of the two stories.
To tell the story of the sense of removal of women from the rest of ‘society,’ which here means ‘men,’ within the frame of the object, was a smaller frame from which a nest representing the woman could be suspended, away from the outer sides of the machine. Taking cues from the visual styles of the movies with the noir attitude toward women—that they are supernaturally elevated from the rest of the world—the noir version of the woman is a mass of a material not found elsewhere in the machine as women are the only source of white light in the otherwise visually dark films. The pink mass is suspended away from the superflat woven side of the object, the woman suspended from the fabric of society of men. This evokes the artificial, flat, painted backdrops in the Expressionist films and the sharply contrasted depth of the actors standing before them. Rotating the machine or walking around it shows a view of the wire woman. This visual is based on the distinctly two-dimensionally rendered characters of anime against the meticulously crafted backgrounds that are usually painted with great depth and shadow. In this view, the woman can be seen to be accepted and incorporated into the fabric of society which is no longer a flat plane, but a mass of tangled ribbons pulled to a variety of depths.
The story of the balance between advancement of technology and the humanity in creation is represented by the woven sides of the object. The woven ribbon side shows the normally functioning scientist trying to decipher the meaning of the multicolored materials. Rotating the machine shows the resulting chaos of obsessively focusing on the experiment and forgetting to live. This romanticism inspired attitude towards science is prominent in the expressionist/noir films, that the creator would descend into madness in forgetting his humanity. To see the story of the struggle of artificial intelligence with the idea of personhood, the machine must be rotated and walked around in a different direction. Wood and metal, typical materials used in constructions, are woven at first before quickly dissolving into chaos, as the creation of man-made artificial intelligence struggles to gain humanity in a physical and social sense to match the resemblance of human mental capability. This attitude is representative of the creations of men in anime.