Or a phrase that sticks out to me from the child robot’s search for the blue fairy in the Kubrick-Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001): she is valued as the one who can make him real. In traditional tellings and re-tellings of the Pinocchio story, the blue fairy figure is always available for access and guidance. But what if she instead were not on-call, but took off on her own mission?
The child robot, stewarded here by Jude Law, can only conceive of such a rupture as a shattering of precious porcelain, as a cruel rejection of his post-human succession by a false goddess, her visage shown crumbling on a Coney Island pier towards the movie's end. But for the fairy, who is never false, but simply withholding—perhaps it is this cracking open of her template that allows her to be whole again, and freer, she who coaxes the immaterial into true Being.
The Yeats verses cited in the clip below, spoken into miraculous neon presence by the quasi-humanoid sentient machine that the child robot is consulting—the look of which very nicely foreshadows Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun project years later, and so much more—are meant to be eerie and hypnotic. The original poem speaks of faeries as stealing away children, when indeed that is only the human way of understanding amid human destruction how the technic has historically transgressed against the veils of the etheric…and what happens then!
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