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This presentation explores the cultural imaginaries of machine vision as it is portrayed in contemporary science fiction, digital art and videogames. How are the relationships between humans and machines imagined in fictional situations and aesthetic contexts where machine vision technologies occur?

We define machine vision as the registration, analysis and generation of visual data by machines, and include technologies such as facial recognition, optical implants, drone surveillance cameras and holograms in this. The project team has selected 335 creative works, primarily games, novels, movies, TV shows and artworks. We have entered structured interpretations of each work in a database (http://machine-vision.no/knowledgebase). We have identified situations in each work where machine vision technologies are used or represented. For each situation, we identify the main actors involved, and specify which actions each actor takes. For instance, the scene in Minority Report where eyedentiscan spider-bots scan Anderton's newly-replaced retina to identify him involves the character John Anderton, who is evading and deceiving the machine vision technologies. The machine vision technologies biometrics and unmanned ground vehicles (the "spyders" or spider-like bots that crawl through the apartment building to find Anderton) are searching, identifying and deceived.

Many contemporary games and narratives have key characters who are machines, cyborgs, robots or AIs, ranging from the Terminator to contemporary figures like the emotionally awkward SecUnit in Martha Wells' Murderbot novels, or the android player-characters in games like Detroit and Nier: Automata. Our analysis of 36 such characters finds that their actions in relation to machine vision can be grouped around three key action verbs: analysing, searching and watching. Interestingly, the watching cluster has two distinct sides, where one set of related actions seems to cluster around communication and social activities, with verbs like hiding, impersonating, confused and feeling, while the other side shows the passive and uncomfortable ways these machine characters engage with machine vision, as they are disabled, overwhelmed and disoriented. Of course, all these machine characters are imagined by humans, and their very positioning as focalisers, narrators and protagonists in narratives and games tends to lend them human qualities.

The 235 human characters we analysed use machine vision and are affected by machine vision in many different ways. Humans are watched, identified and scanned, and they are scared. The most frequent action taken by humans in relation to machine vision is evading it, but the next more frequent action is to attack using machine vision technologies. There is of course far more nuance in the material than this might suggest, and human characters also use machine vision technologies for activities such as deceiving, embellishing and killing. Our quantitative analysis will be qualified using close readings of excerpts from the works we have analysed.

How do videogames imagine diegetic and extradiegetic posthuman agents? In a sense, videogame play is already posthuman. The player of a videogame is redistributed in an interrelational assemblage of human and non-human agents (Braidotti 2013); of physical world, player, technology, player character, and virtual environment (Taylor 2009).

Thus, videogames, by their very “nature” should allow us to play out versions of breaking away from anthropocentric idealism and experience what new modes of subjectivity and agency might entail. 

One such attempt is found in the 2017 videogame NieR: Automata (PlatinumGames 2017), lauded as a work of existential nihilism and post-humanity (as “after-human” as well as “beyond-“ or “more-than-human”). NieR: Automata is a role-playing action adventure videogame set in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth where androids and machines are caught in an eternal war. The player “controls” the android 2B, and later other androids and drone companions, to fight machines on behalf of humanity.

The director, Yoko Taro, has explained that the videogame intentionally avoids asking, “What does it mean to be human?” in favor of asking questions about what is left when we are gone (Muncy 2018).

The videogame more than nods at the posthuman in its narrative and gameplay, as it rejects standardized perception (Gerrish 2018) and traditional depictions of characters (Wright 2020) for machines interacting outside of the human sensorium, and idiosyncratic narrative structures (Backe 2018; Jaćević 2017).

Yet even if the humans behind the conflict are revealed to be long gone, their traces linger as machines and androids are struggling with concepts of human society such as gender, race, and human language. What happens to the posthuman stance of videogame play when machines are breaking away from humanism’s restricted notion of what being human is while continuously performing versions of it?

This presentation investigates how NieR: Automata consolidates reversing an anthropocentric view with firmly situating the human in the network. Through conceptualizing the posthuman as an interrelated agent (Braidotti 2013; Hayles 1999; 2017), the videogame presents oppositions to the humanist fantasy of autonomy on several fronts, especially in the final scene of the videogame. Here, the player has to shoot (and by extension, kill) the credits with names of the developers.

After removing the creators, the player can choose to “release” the player characters by deleting the videogame’s save file, thus stopping the perpetual circle of war, dying, and rebirth that the videogame presents. Is this part of the posthuman agent? Ultimately, in the tension between accelerating and inhibiting agency, in joining and distributing perspectives, in prompting continuation and condemning it, NieR: Automata imagines a paradoxical posthuman future of a human present.

Now that we're all getting comfortable with the notion of reading books on digital displays, it's little surprise that developers are starting to explore the interactive possibilities of electronic novels. In fact, simple interactive fiction has been available on the iPod since the very beginning, with a community of writers using the HTML functionality in the device's Notes application to create "choose your own adventure" stories.

Since then, the actual Choose Your Own Adventure Company, which now owns the rights to the classic interactive children's novels, has ported a couple of old favourites to iPhone. Meanwhile, Edward Packard, the original author and creator of the CYOA series, has a new brand name, U-Ventures and is adapting and updating many of his old titles for iOS platforms.