The animation, named ‘Trapped’ with three scenes, an Isolated Life, Harmony between Human and AI Technology, and the Dilemma in AI-companion, explores a heated theme of transcending reality.
This animation incorporates strong experimental aesthetic style with continuous movement of destruction, deconstruction and reorganization of visual conceptualisations, revealing humans’ emotional states in a metaphysical way.
The innovations of form and content in it will bring the audience an alternative perspective to the relation between humans and AI technology. Through narrative repetition and circulation, this animation shows a dilemma in AI- needed social life and human psychology of real-life interaction needs; through avant-garde symphony, audience will be personally on the scene with strong sense of rhythm.
The abstract genre with the deconstructive sub-genre is intended in favour of symbolic effects. The man in the animation represents individuals in modern society and use human-like figure to represent robot. Several ‘signifiers’ such as a pair of hands, a fish tank, the jellyfish and the box represent the boundary that the artificial intelligence builds between the individual and the outside world.
This paradoxically emotion companion may leave the audience to reflect the virtual nature of AI companion. Audience could wonder whether this emotions with robots are virtual true or real virtual; and whether virtual existence or physical appearance in robots could bring humans the real emotional needs; and whether AI, or virtual technology will place human’s interaction with other in the near future.
Process
Proposal
Introduction
Nowadays, the world is full of sounds and furies, and people all over the world have been witnessed the increasingly progress in artificial intelligence. People have deeply immersed into the artificial intellectual devises. Therefore, mechanism affects their social life to some extent. To express this effect, I want to use a special method.
Stressing the aesthetic and philosophic aspects, animation is a useful tool to show the inner meaning of how AI affecting human beings. There are several advantages in animation. First, it is not through copy but through the movement to show the essence of the reality (Holloway, 1972, p9 cited in Wells, 2015). Second, as John Halas and Joy Batchelor note, animation can transcend beyond real world to display metaphysical reality and tell not what the world is, but what the world mean (Hoffer, 1981, p3 cited in Wells, 2015). Finally, animation involves emotion expressions within visual system to fully investigate the relation between human and robots. Therefore, the animation can convey the relation of human and AI perfectly.
In this paper, the animation ‘Trapped’ will explore ethic issues in an abstract and experimental style. I will answer some questions about whether automaton would give a support for lonely people, or the robots simply means severe attachment to individuals, which would probably isolate them further in my animation.
Content research (including ethic issues)
The film, her (2014), a romantic science-fiction drama film directed by Spike Jonze, tells a love story between a man and an artificial intellectual robot without physical appearance. The subject of non-existence AI exists on millions of programmers. Therefore, the simulacra in virtual could reproduce themselves and gradually erode the real world. We could predict that the world will be quite advanced, prosperous, and urbanized, but on the other side, people are quite alienated, lonely, and distrusted. Also, the evolvement of AI would somewhat replace dependence among humans physical and emotional contact further. It conforms to the view of Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, that our culture has come to prize the simulation over the real (Coit, 2016).
Family is the most basic and important part of human system. In her, the interpersonal interaction between friends, lovers even family members could be replaced by AI. The human-AI emotional dependence is not only existing in the science fiction. From the current view, the introduction of ‘affective computing model’ artificial intelligence has been recognised by the human. Also, there has been a significant increase in the number of robots for health-care and companionship for the elderly and children (Lin, Abney and Bekey, 2012).
Artificial Intelligence invades the basic unit of human society, which is bound to cause some imbalanced orders. The excessive reliance on artificial intelligence would probably damage the companionship of fellow human beings, which is the key to the development of human existence. Therefore, while enjoying the unlimited convenience that rapidly emerging technology brings, people are supposed to consider the potential crisis and ethical problems.
Structure (narrative)
What makes the story charm is to engage the real sense of loss and create a disequilibrium (Hall, 2007). In ‘Trapped’, the sense of alienation and discomfort of loneliness brings the character to emotionally depend on AI. During their interaction, the man has been left in company of robots. In this seemingly harmony process, it brings many ethical issues and simulates reflection that whether AI could bring humans the emotional needs. The deep immersion of this intimate company would gradually erode the character’s normal social life and make them far more alone. Following this trend, it would do incredible damage to basic fabric of the society.
‘Trapped’ applies the symbolic narration and intertwines with the simile, metaphor, metonym, and synecdoche (Hall, 2007). Inspired by one shot in the animation ‘I Have Dreamed Of You So Much’ (Vakarelova, 2016), I also set up a scene (Fig 1). The individual character is on a lake, and an embrace uses part of an artificial-intelligence robot to stand for the whole part, but also engages the metonym to imply the warm companionship.
