Mar. 9th, 2012 12:44 pm
[watch this video] Kara
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unjapanologistSocial experiment: please watch the video before reading any of the text that follows it? There seems to be wide agreement that this is a moving and poignant short, but I'm curious to know exactly why different people find it poignant, so I don't want to impose my framing of what happens beforehand.
Kara (7min)
"Kara" is intended to show off the motion capture technology that will be used for some future games on the PS3. Reading the full article only after I'd watched the video, it struck me how my reaction to it was different from that of Cory Doctorow, whose introduction to the vid on Boing Boing was the only text I read before moving on to the video. He writes that "the unsettling poignancy of this clip arises from the gender and form of the robot". In the comments to that article (which are somewhat iffy in places), lots of people pipe up with where they think the poignancy came from, citing everything from the robot's appearance to her human-like reactions to the music. There's more interpretations in the comments on YouTube (which are iffier).
I found this moving as well, but I'm fairly sure that the "gender and form of the robot" had very little to do with my reaction. For me, this video was all about the story of Kara and the assembly worker, their interactions, and their relationship. Kara is certainly impressively human-like, the acting is good, the music helps, and so on, but all that just works to support what is essentially - for me - a character piece. Some Boing Boing commenters felt the story would have been stronger if the whole thing had been deliberate, a test to see if the robot was self-aware enough. While that might have been interesting, it's not my preferred interpretation, because it would interfere with my reading of this as two characters interacting. If it was all a set-up and the assembly worker's reactions were routine and fake, something he does twenty times a day with every robot he tests, that would mean these two characters didn't really connect. I want there to be shippiness everywhere, darn it.
Kara (7min)
"Kara" is intended to show off the motion capture technology that will be used for some future games on the PS3. Reading the full article only after I'd watched the video, it struck me how my reaction to it was different from that of Cory Doctorow, whose introduction to the vid on Boing Boing was the only text I read before moving on to the video. He writes that "the unsettling poignancy of this clip arises from the gender and form of the robot". In the comments to that article (which are somewhat iffy in places), lots of people pipe up with where they think the poignancy came from, citing everything from the robot's appearance to her human-like reactions to the music. There's more interpretations in the comments on YouTube (which are iffier).
I found this moving as well, but I'm fairly sure that the "gender and form of the robot" had very little to do with my reaction. For me, this video was all about the story of Kara and the assembly worker, their interactions, and their relationship. Kara is certainly impressively human-like, the acting is good, the music helps, and so on, but all that just works to support what is essentially - for me - a character piece. Some Boing Boing commenters felt the story would have been stronger if the whole thing had been deliberate, a test to see if the robot was self-aware enough. While that might have been interesting, it's not my preferred interpretation, because it would interfere with my reading of this as two characters interacting. If it was all a set-up and the assembly worker's reactions were routine and fake, something he does twenty times a day with every robot he tests, that would mean these two characters didn't really connect. I want there to be shippiness everywhere, darn it.
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It is a common trope (though I must say, I think I've only read ff with it -- robots as everything else, yes, that, no) -- I mean, looking at it, I had all the other robots and similar stories running through my mind.
One problem, to me, with the story, is that the robot is too human, too self aware. It bothers me at a level of -- you are doing something in an assembly line, all the same, why this one has such a spark? It skirts too close for comfort to positing a soul, that some of them will have and some will not, for no reason at all. She's too human for her context. (Something out of one of the Asimov stories would've worked better -- the robots that acquired consciousness through clear(er) means (an intern designing a more complex brain which required them to sleep, and this dream, etc).)
I don't know exactly why I would feel better if it it were a woman! I suspect I unconsciously expect such a character to be more sympathetic -- for example, to help the robot escape. It totally depends on the personality, but I guess my instinctual reaction is not to trust men with power over other people and to have more hope a woman wouldn't abuse that power.
It probably also bothered me and had me tense because the robot was naked -- I mean, I am sure they did that both to show off to player what a nice animation they would have at their reach, and to underscore the vulnerability of the character (along with the guys 'honey's), but I couldn't concentrate on the story because the character was so vulnerable, and I so wanted her to stop being so.
Idk -- I may be skewing your data, because I didn't find it all that moving, and it actually bothered me at several levels. I don't like the short so much, but I'm sure thinking to nominating it to yuletide so someone can write fix-it fic -- of the 'explain this' kind and of the 'damn make her escape' kind. /0\