REPRESENTACIONES FEMENINAS DE INTELIGENCIA ARTIFICIAL: EX MACHINA REVISA LOS MITOS DE PANDORA Y GALATEA

The portrayal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in contemporary cinema speaks to the dominant discourse in the European tradition about humanity’s fears and hopes generated by the creation of artificial life. The present study seeks to analyse the portrayal of the female as an iconic representation of Artificial Intelligence in the context of the current zeitgeist (Drosnin, 1997; Keane, 2006) as the work of filmmakers explores both long-standing and recent concerns about female robots by bringing them to life on the screen (Pandya, 2019; Hamilton, 2018). We submit that an exploration of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) as a new reading of the Galatea and Pandora myths will bear out our hypothesis that the female robot model projects the spectre of the monstrous feminine, and may embolden filmmakers to endeavour more complex representations of females capable of subverting the power structure of patriarchal ideology (Modleski, 2002).