Alex Garland, writer of 28 Days Later and Sunshine, makes his directorial debut with the stylish and cerebral thriller, Ex Machina. Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer at an internet-search giant, wins a competition to spend a week at the private mountain estate of the company's brilliant and reclusive CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Upon his arrival, Caleb learns that Nathan has chosen him to be the human component in a Turing Test—charging him with evaluating the capabilities, and ultimately the consciousness, of Nathan’s latest experiment in artificial intelligence. That experiment is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a breathtaking A.I. whose emotional intelligence proves more sophisticated––and more deceptive––than the two men could have imagined.
Following the film: a conversation between Timothy Morton, PhD (Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University) and Andrew Gerber, MD, PhD (President and Medical Director, Silver Hill Hospital) — a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose principal interests and research lie in studying the neurobiological bases of social cognition. Together they will approach the question of Ava’s interiority, and our own, from two directions that do not easily agree.
