Finding softness within cyberpunk

old essay about A.I. Mama

In acknowledgement of A.I. Mama’s journey and life for the past couple years, I’m sharing an essay (manifesto?) I wrote that was included in SYMS Magazine in 2020, about the alternative ways we can interpret the cyborg archetype.

The cyborg is the embodiment of intersections and contradictions, born from change and transformation. The underground Japanese cyberpunk movement unearthed the cyborg from atomic war, rapid industrialization, and extreme societal angst. Technology invading and infesting beneath our skin is a modern threat that strikes abject fear within us, but how can it be embraced as a symbiotic relationship? The cyborg, so central to the cyberpunk films in 80s-90s Japan, is monstrous and malicious, but also molded by love. My desire to dive deeper into this archetype begins with examining one of the first Japanese cyberpunk films, Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989, dir. Shinya Tsukamoto), along with my own short film that I created as a response, A.I. Mama.

Tetsuo is a 16mm film that portrays a chaotic journey towards an unforgettable, radical metamorphosis from man to cyborg. The black and white visuals create a dynamic, contrasting battle of deep darkness and blinding light. Yet the tension is not strictly visual—the industrial score and the heavy breathing of the tormented salaryman express an opaque destiny that reflects a mutated, post-modern Tokyo.

Tetsuo was the first film to introduce me to the articulation of trauma and memory, housed within DIY cyberpunk aesthetics. Despite the cold and alien feel of Tetsuo, I have always found warmth and comfort within its synthetic core. In fact, the film ends in a love story: the man falling into sweet surrender to the technological singularity, continuing their eternal love of industrial transformation. Two transhuman-ferrics (the Metal Fetishist and the Iron Man) merge together as one monstrous being, swearing to commit destruction amongst the rest of the sleeping world. The Metal Fetishist closes the film with the line: “We can rust the whole world, and scatter it into the dust of the universe.” In the end, the post-industrial cyborg super-machine speeds through the small roads of the city, in a rabid, tortured mess covered in aluminum foil, plaster, and wires—but against all odds, in love.

In the context of the present, how can the cyborg body be re-contextualized (or reprogrammed) to further discuss softness? To face this question, I made a cyberpunk film emulating the same aesthetics, with a painful story and a parallel ending.

A.I. Mama features a character named Kei, a non-binary character played by a transmasc actor with the same name. After an unexplained disappearance of their mother, Kei attempts to reconnect with her through the matrix—sitting in bed with their homemade A.I., typing in programmable memories and tearing out old diary entries to feed into the machine. As Kei cooks a homemade meal that their mother once taught them, the computer begins to malfunction and enter a new form of life. For a moment, we hear the human calls of their mother, her voice slightly glitched from the matrix she may be trapped in, and an alarmed Kei calls back out to her in front of the flashing screen. An animation directed by Charlotte Hong Bee Her flickers and flutters with high energy, as the film quickly descends into a violent merging of human and machine. The film concludes with a peaceful Kei entangled in a bed of wires and cables, their metaphysical mother finally able to join her child in the physical realm via a cluster of umbilical cords—the ending shot reminding us that examinations of trauma are inseparable from the journey of healing.

Rather than centering a parasitic story of man and machine, A.I. Mama tells of a symbiotic bond between a mother and a child, a link that can pierce through binaries. This new archetype of the cyborg thus expands the discourse surrounding embodied marginalized identities. As people straddle the drawn borders and hierarchies of existence, suffering under institutionalized oppression is a specific yet common experience. Being a cyborg is messy! They are born from a merging of powerful forces, refusing to be boxed into a single identity. They are human, machine, mother, child, creator, and creation all at once. And we can apply this existence to ourselves: regardless of societal dualisms that cleanly divide gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality, etc.—we constantly dissolve these false boundaries with the facts of our existence.

A neo-cyberpunk approach focuses on an evolved language for the masses, speaking of the marginalized body and psyche in relation to this modern age of techno-hegemony. What would it look like if we understood the pervasiveness of technology in our lives, and created new spaces and languages for discussing a liberated coexistence? The cyborg no longer becomes a feared body, but a symbiotic life form that can further express our confusing, contradictory human narrative. Through that effort brings forth softness—a fully aware empathy for diaspora narratives, queer life, and the sociopolitical histories embedded into our bodies.

In A.I. Mama’s ending, the machine merges with the human in a conflux rather than a devourment. Both characters, or forces, have a mutual desire to meet each other. Within the animation sequence, Kei’s metallic, chaotic sound design grows to a crescendo as we see his character embody the madness of the machine they created: an endless oscillation of the mother birthing the child and the child birthing the mother, blurring the line between creator and creation. The modern cyborg expresses this sentiment of karmic influence. What you create creates you as well—an idea inspired by the words of one of my favorite sci-fi authors Octavia Butler, from Parable of the Sower: “All that you Change // Changes you”.

After the completion of A.I. Mama, I was faced with a truth that affirmed my confidence: we have the means to build narratives for the future, inspired by the past. The bond between human and machine is an eternal discussion, and cinema is on the forefront amongst the tools of exploration. The tension of the future lies within the present—both cyberpunk and neo-cyberpunk films and writings have constantly examined the unstoppable machine that charges towards an unknown totality. Like the Metal Fetishist and the Iron Man’s love, or the ever-morphing merge of Kei and their computer mother, the filmmaker and the camera open endless possibilities to rust the whole world with their cyborg beauty.