In my independent feature film production Astronaut, one of the characters is Ejahja. She is the on-board artificial intelligence who manages the spacecraft depicted in the movie. Ejahja is an example of what Stephen Baxter in his fiction refer to as a Virtual, a volumetric display embodiment of an artificial sentience. She has an inter-textual ancestry going back to artificial intelligences in movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) and Alien (Scott, 1979). She was portrayed by an actress and the live action imagery was manipulated to look as if she is a virtual
character (see Figure 32).101
Figure 32. The virtual character Ejahja in the movie Astronaut. Tempcomp by the author.
The character Ejahja is a super-sign, signifying the idea of a [volumetric display of an artificial intelligences]. As we will see, similar super-signs have been constructed in many other movies, as well as in several of Baxter’s stories. I will dissect Ejahja’s
construction, and point to a few similarities of what other storytellers have done.102
Ejahja’s construction is quite simple and the sub-signs making her can be described in full:
• [young female artificial intelligence] – as will be discussed later this is highly typical in the science fiction genre
• [virtual character, direct reference] – the name Ejahja is an intentional reference to the term AI, for artificial intelligence.
• [on-screen presence] – she is seen on a large computer wallscreen • [black empty background] – she is situated in an empty void • [grey color] / [monochrome] – her featureless, grey clothing
• [surrealistic color grading] – I manipulated the grey scales and colors to
achieve an effect similar to solarization103
• [blooming blacks] – a color grading effect where dark areas of the image increase in size
• [transformation] – the color grading changes slightly
• [frozen motion] – she briefly pauses, as if waiting for instructions • [neutral expression]/[zombie-like] – her emotions and behavior are
downplayed in a subtle way by the actress
• [referring to data] – ”Yes, it is ready for display”
• [virtual character, direct reference] – ”It is not certain that I have a life.” • [virtual character, direct reference] – “Are you aware of yourself?”, “I don’t
know.”
• [virtual character, direct reference] – ”You won’t go HAL on me will you?”104
These sub-signs are organized as shown on the next page, Figure 33.
102 This is based on my reading of the half-completed shot, eight years after I last worked with
them. The erosion of my own memory of the work gives me more the status of a reader than of an author. This is interesting from an auto-ethnographic viewpoint, as well as in relation to the hermeneutic discussion about the death of the author. As an author of these shots, I have “died” and returned as a reader. But, the parallel reading of the archived e-mail conversations
symbolically resurrects the author in me.
103 Solarization is an effect where grey scales and colors are displaced to make a surrealistic effect. 104 HAL is the artificial intelligence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Figure 33. The structure of the Ejahja super-sign.
One prominent sub-sign is that Ejahja is a young female. Similar characters have been used in several movies (for example the Test Card girl in Life on Mars, Seraph in The Matrix Revolutions, the Ghost in Avalon, and Skynet in Terminator Salvation). I will look more closely at the Red Queen in Resident Evil and the White Queen in one of the sequels, Resident Evil Extinction. Both of these characters are Virtuals, volumetric display projections of artificial intelligences, taking the form of a young girl with artificial appearance and behavior.
What strategies have I, and other movie makers, used to represent these
characters as virtual? Ejahja is seen on the screen, in her own enclosed black void of hers. The Red Queen is a volumetric display and the display technology is
emphasized by light beams projecting her, and by typical image artifact signs such as [flickering] and [scan-lines]. The (likewise female) Skynet character in Terminator Salvation is also seen on computer screens. Seeing a character displayed on a screen is a strong, hard to miss, sign, but the meaning is not obvious. After all, the imagery could be interpreted as mediated, as in a videoconference. One way to create
supporting signs of virtuality, is to manipulate the visual style, especially the color grading of the character. That is a method I used and the signs I created for Ejahja are listed above. Color grading effects are also used for the Red Queen: [red-tint], reflections reminiscent of [liquids], [desaturation], [semi-transparence], and [brightly lit]. Note that the White Queen (in the sequel) uses only one of these signs,
[brightly lit], maybe because the movie makers anticipate that the first movie firmly established this artificial intelligence character. From a production viewpoint, shots of these Virtuals can be created in two ways: either you shoot live action footage and manipulate it (making it look virtual), or you create computer graphics that appear virtual because the 3d model used in the production process is a real-life virtual object. From a production viewpoint it is advantageous with the first option of manipulating live action footage into representing virtuality. The reason for this is quite straightforward – it is much easier (quicker and cheaper) to shoot a real
actor instead of modeling and animating a computer graphics character – and this was very much the rationale when I created Ejahja.
Yet another similarity between Ejahja and the two Queens of the Resident Evil franchise was how verbal signs were put to use. For Ejahja, the dialogue with the human protagonist Scott about her ontological status as self-conscious entity highlights her as an artificial intelligence, and was one of the meanings I wanted to convey in the scene. Essentially, the two characters, the man and the machine, say good-bye to each other before they are both destroyed. The two queens of the Resident Evil saga also talk with human characters in a manner relating to their status as artificial intelligences. The White Queen reveals her status with the line
“My sensors have detected…”105, which is quite similar to Ejahja’s line “Yes, it is
ready for display”. They both refer to hardware peripherals that in-directly
designate them as not human.106 A similar verbal reference has been used in
another of my productions. The science show Rymdlust had a narrator, with lines written by me, that was supposed to be the ship’s on-board computer. She presents
herself with “I am Technica, this spacecraft’s main computer”.107 Note that
Technica is female, just as Ejahja and the Resident Evil Queens. Interestingly, the ship-bound, disembodied artificial intelligence voice that is such a common trope in science fiction movies is usually female. The father of all these fictive spaceship artificial intelligences might have been the male HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but HAL was distinctly androgynous and the aptly named Mother in Alien (Scott, 1979) has become the ancestor to a long row of female on-board AI’s. Huyssen (1981) points out that fictional robots in general are female. Then there is the virtually embodied artificial intelligence (that is, the Virtual, projected as volumetric display), which often appears as a young girl. Without being consciously aware of these predecessors, I created two characters – Ejahja and Technica – that
corresponded to this pattern. The logic of the young female Virtual is open for different interpretations; one might be that the syntagmatic juxtaposition between young innocent girls and futuristic technology creates a surrealism that emphasizes
the artificiality of the character.108 Other possible motivations for the female gender
of these Virtuals are the old heritage of female secretaries and the human computers of early Twentieth century; originally, computer was the term for a human – often a group of women – doing mathematical calculations. As pointed out by Cheris Kramarae (1998), “women are employed to do what the men don’t want to do and the machines can’t do yet“ (p.15). Huyssen (1981) suggests that the
105 At 01:14:20.
106 The phrase ”It is ready for display” could be uttered in a natural way by a human, but my co-
director Rick Dunbar had actress Grace Folsom look up and freeze in an anticipating manner, subtly indicating that the display feature was an embodied part of her being. This is a clear example of how a combination of subtle signs, in themselves unrelated to virtuality, can support each other and create a super-sign that connotes virtuality.
107 Originally in Swedish; ”Jag är Technica, den här rymdfarkostens huvuddator”.
108 This is similar to how the juxtaposition of an innocent girl and a demon creates an intriguing
representation of evil, as exemplified in The Exorcist by William Friedkin and countless other horror movies.
robot, the artificial life, is so often female because it symbolizes man’s final conquering of nature, it is “the male phantasm of a creation without mother;” allowing man to be “at long last alone and at one with himself” (p.227). Concerning Ejahja, I rather considered her as a companion to the lonely, male astronaut
protagonist of the story, the other side of a symbiotic, platonic relationship. My exact reasoning for having Ejahja being female remains vague. E-mail
conversation from the production suggests that the choice of gender for Ejahja was
somewhat arbitrary. I wrote this with co-director Rick Dunbar on January 21st,
2003.
Thommy: “I suggest female”
Rick: “I agree! No idea why I changed this...”
It could be that I was influenced by intertextual references, possibly Resident Evil (it was released the same year I wrote the script for Astronaut). I did write into the movie script that Ejahja was female, but there was no mention of her young age. Ejahja’s young age – the actress being in her early teens at the shoot – was
somewhat arbitrary and an example of serendipity. Ejahja appearing as a young teen had partly come from production circumstances. This e-mail exchange is from
July 1st, 2003.
Thommy: “BTW, again, I just realized that we will need a female voice for Ejahja, the artificial intelligence onboard the ship. It would be nice to have an american accent on that voicer, not swedish, and I started to think about young girl I
mentioned that auditioned together with Ted. Would she be interested in doing the voice over? Or maybe even have screen time, we could use footage of her on a computer screen, and filter it, so it looks as if Ejahja is a virtual ship member, not only a voice.”
Rick: “The question for you is, what age would you like the voice to sound? An actress would much prefer to have her face on screen, but a VO is better than no role at all. There is one particular actress I would like to have a shot at it because she is a friend of a friend. However, I don’t want that to influence your decision. Just tell me what age you are looking for and we’ll take it from there.
Thommy: “I think Grace is the one for the Ejahja character. She was good during audition, and she got a personal look which I think correspond great for Ejahja. A good second choice would be Rachael, I really think she did an equally good performance, even though she doesn’t look like Ejahja to me (but if Grace can't do Ejahja I can consider Rachael instead).”
What this exchange shows is that we were in a small-scale production situation where we had to make use of the actors we had easy access to, and that both the age of Ejahja and the idea to color grade (“filter”) the imagery co-evolved with the casting procedures. The example of the Ejahja super-sign is an example of how creative decisions can be influenced by different vague influences: a mix of intertextual influences, plot-derived necessities, and practical production circumstances.