The relationship between man and machine in the film Ex_Machina: approximations and distances

Abstract

Globalization has unleashed changes in collective and individual contexts of society, among which we can mention the technology that, after establishing itself in social practices, broke the boundaries that delineated the connection between human beings and machines. Based on this premise, this research aims to investigate the effects of meaning produced in the “human x nonhuman” relationship in the movie Ex_Machina, in order to understand how the character Ava negotiates and problematizes her process of “humanization” through the meanings and historical functionings, linguistic and symbolic elements present in movie materiality. In order to achieve what was established in the objective, the study is theoretically anchored in the post-human debates of Heidegger (1977), Haraway (1991), Clark (2003), Hayles (2005), Marcolin (2009), Savulescu (2009), Siqueira and Medeiros (2011), Braidotti (2013), Ferrando (2016), Vilaça and Dias (2014) Bolter (2016). In addition, in order to guide the discussions, “movie analysis” was used as a methodological strategy within the scope of Materialist Discourse Analysis, mobilized in the studies of Lagazzi (2009, 2011) which made it possible to investigate clippings that presented a pattern of (de)humanization of the character Ava. Based on the analytical gesture, the results showed that the interaction of man versus machine represented by the central characters Caleb and Ava constitutes a possible relationship in verbal and visual aspects. In this way, the humanization of the character was presented as an inherent factor in her formation, since she was built by a human being and, in turn, her elementary characteristics interconnect with human actions, despite her other inhuman characteristics.