Almost three years ago, one of my first posts on this blog was about Steven Soderberg’s version of Solaris, and how it acted like a “mutant womb” or “prototyping space” for our concepts of sociality, and resonated with the discourse of artificial intelligence. The narrative functions like a huge Turing Test, in which interpretive choices are an essential part of a strange, displacing dialogue with what one would commonsensically see as the usual “task” of AI: “creating a sentient Other”. (Of course, AI’s reductionist instrumentalism is completely displaced by Solaris, and instead rendered as an enigma, or “natural phenomenon”, or an arrival of an Other.)
More recently, I mentioned this in relation to how Battlestar Galactica approaches the figure of the Cylon woman in such a loaded and yet interesting way. Again: artificial intelligence and the prototypical, with the figure of the womb-matrix (and the sex/gender system) made even more literal.
Today I went back to Alan Turing’s original essay about his eponymous Test for sentience, and noticed that he based the Turing Test on an “imitation game”, in which an interrogator must differentiate between a man and a woman via only a typewritten conversation with them both. Moreover, the man must pretend to be a woman, while the woman should tell “the truth” about her gender. Whoa! In Turing’s test, the computer takes the place of the man. Double-whoa!
There’s a final resonance here: not long after writing this paper, Turing was arrested for sodomy. (Get this — his boyfriend robbed his house, and when asked about the nature of their relationship when Turing reported this to the authorities, Turing told the cops that he was, uh, fucking the guy.) Unrepentant about this sexuality, Turing was sentenced to forced “organotherapy”— female hormone injections — in order to reduce his libido. And not long after this, he committed suicide.
I have no idea what to make of this, except to note how compellingly these fragments of association flag the way in which systems of sex/gender/sexuality always lie crucially within fundamental questions of technology, the social and the human, and our capacity to conceive of them (which is what the question of artificial intelligence is actually all about). And for me, this reminder is much more useful than any liberal handwringing about “where are the women bloggers?”, or overaestheticised, fetishistic visions of cyberfeminism.
[ tags: alan-turing, artificial-intelligence, battlestar-galactica, gender, homophobia, solaris, steven-soderberg, turing-test ]
there’s a v.interesting doco by ninon liotet called ‘transcodeur express’ that looks at gender, sexuality and new media (esp electronic music). it interviews ppl such as terre thaemlitz, chris korda, jenny holzer, netochka nezvanova, etc.
it’s full of interesting info such as how ada lovelace was basically the inventor of software…
anyway, there’s a section in which sadie plant talks about how turing committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple (with all of its symbolism) and how she is reminded of him every time she sees the rainbow apple of apple computers…