About the Author
This website represents the culmination of my time at the University of Texas at Austin receiving my Masters in Media Studies.
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I first began to take an interest in machine-human interactions and relationships in Dr. Sharon Strover's "Communication, Technology, and Culture" class, where I was first introduced to the digital influencer Lil Miquela. Miquela was the start of my thinking about the ways that we integrate machines and technology into our daily lives. In following this line of enquiry, I found myself contemplating the way that in taking a recuperative stance toward technology, and in looking at our images of machines and tech through a queer lens, can reveal new modes of being in the world. I found myself transfixed by the ways that these creations are frequently the backdrop that allow humans a way to imagine a different world and a different self. More often than not, these imaginings take on a distinctly counter-hegemonic sensibility.
Halfway through “Communication, Technology, and Culture” (Spring 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic forced us into remote online courses. I’m writing this section on the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring a worldwide pandemic. Since then, I’ve completed the majority of my Masters remotely.
Click here to watch Theodore and Samantha together
Intimacy and the Body without organs
Samantha and Theodore's first physically intimate moment
Samantha and Theodore’s first sexually intimate moment takes place around 40 minutes into the film. After a failed date, Theodore lies in bed talking with Samantha. She
shares her growing ability to feel emotions and worries if they are real or just programmed. Theodore, in beginning to transgress the boundaries between him and Samantha, assures her, “You feel real to me Samantha. I wish you were in this room with me right now...so I could put my arms around, so I could touch you.” Samantha then asks, “How would you touch me?” As Theodore continues to tell Samantha how he would pleasure her, the scene cuts to black, Samantha and Theodore’s voices the only sound coming through the screen. This cut to black serves to equalize Theodore and Samantha as two entities experiencing the “consistency of desire” (154). They both reach their peak and the scene fades into the Los Angeles skyline at early dawn. Theodore breathes, “Oh my god, I was just somewhere else with you.”
While this scene acts as the turning point in the relationship between the AI operating system and Theodore, it also attends to desire and its effect in moving towards a Body without Organs. Delueze and Guattari describe desire as an embodied sensation “without reference to any exterior agency...:” (154). As the scene cuts to black, the audience is deprived of being able to see any aspect of Theodore’s body, nor are they able to see the effect the encounter is having on him. Instead, Theodore and Samantha’s desire is posited as something flowing between the two of them. Their “bodies” (Theodore’s physical body and Samantha’s network) are flattened, reduced in the moment to a Body without Organs, just the
"Oh my god, I was just somewhere else with you."
unrestricted flow of desire itself between the two entities (156). In this moment, before the climax and externalization of pleasure, Samantha and Theodore are experiencing desire, not “suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt” (155). The anxiety and shame that Deluze and Guattari mention, come after the encounter. Theodore experiences all three of the emotions in the following scenes. He withdraws from the relationship for a while, leaving Samantha confused.
 The BwO and Her |  The BwO and Samantha's Departure |
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