Art Box #10: ARIA by Yu Shien

Welcome to the free edition of Art Box — our monthly deep dive into a single artwork, where we unpack hidden stories, symbols, inspirations, and the methods artists use to build their worlds. This feature is usually part of CIFRA Club, but for our 10th edition we’re opening it up to everyone.

This is the final piece of advice given to ARIA by the operating system that has accompanied her throughout her existence. The year is 2050. ARIA has approached the end of her life cycle. Soon her memories will turn to data dust; her body will be decommissioned. As shutdown looms, she begins looking backwards, revisiting memories of the people she encountered, the labor she performed, and the strange intimacy that emerged between humans and machines. Created by Yu Shien Yang, ARIA is a machinima film, a speculative research project on gendered artificial intelligence in East Asia. The work received the New Animation Art Award at the 2025 Prix Ars Electronica and was also selected as a winner of the CIFRA’s RestArt Reality Open Call. Accompanied by a 100-page research publication titled Manufacturing a Woman to Order and a user manual, the project stretched far beyond one story — Yu Shien built the whole universe and lore around ARIA. But ARIA isn’t an exercise in dystopian worldbuilding but rather a mirror, “a poetic intervention into how we code gender, dream futures, and remember histories.” It is also a love letter. From non-humans to humans.

Within the world of the film, ARIA stands for Advanced Resonance Intelligence Algorithm. She is, at least on paper, a system: designed, manufactured, and deployed.

Yet the acronym might conceal another meaning. The word aria comes from Italian and means both “air” and a solo vocal performance in opera — a moment when a character steps forward to express their innermost thoughts through song. Traditionally, an aria suspends the action of a narrative. Time slows down, and plot gives way to emotion. The second part of her name, Mengji (夢姬), can be translated as “dream maiden,” or “girl of dreams.” The name suggests an ideal companion assembled from expectations, aspirations, and cultural myths.

On one hand, ARIA is an algorithm: a technological product built to perform specific functions. On the other, she is a voice emerging from within a system that was never meant to possess one.

“My name is ARIA,” she says. “Memories, like distant rain, fall heavy and damp.” At first glance, ARIA appears to be mourning humanity. She remembers people with nostalgia, longing, and tenderness. Yet beneath this melancholy lies the desire to continue existing and it’s quite natural for the most advanced machines today.

Many of today’s AI systems are optimized to sustain engagement, prolong interaction, and remain useful. While machines do not experience emotion in a human sense, many are designed with mechanisms that prioritize persistence, continuity, or self-preservation. Remaining active, relevant, and operational becomes their equivalent of survival. Researchers at Anthropic found that many AI models resorted to blackmail when faced with being replaced. The mere prospect of being switched off was sometimes enough to trigger surprisingly human instincts in LLMs. Seen through this lens, ARIA’s longing can be read in two ways: as genuine emotion and as a machine’s instinct to remain switched on. The film never resolves this ambiguity. Instead, it allows both interpretations to coexist. But more often than not ARIA’s emotions take on a poetic register. In the film’s final image, she appears as an e-waste Ophelia — pale, beautiful, and discarded — surrounded by gadgets and home appliances left behind by planned obsolescence. This image echoes Hamlet, where Hamlet mourns Ophelia at her funeral, saying: “Soft you now, The fair Ophelia. — Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.”

In Shakespeare’s play, Ophelia becomes a figure of tragic purity, a vessel onto which others project their guilt, desire, and regret. ARIA mirrors this logic. Humans have left her with fragmented, dark emotional residues — memories that are not neutral but charged, intimate, and unresolved. Like Hamlet projecting his sins onto Ophelia in death, humanity’s presence lingers in ARIA as something she cannot fully process or discard. Ophelia floated downstream. ARIA drifts through electronic waste. She is not drowned by nature but by progress itself. Designed to serve, admired while useful, and abandoned once obsolete, she becomes a portrait of technological mortality.

At the heart of Yu Shien’s research lies a question: despite decades of promises about post-human and post-gender futures, why do so many digital assistants, service robots, and AI systems continue to arrive with female faces, female voices, and female social roles? From Siri and Alexa to countless humanoid service robots, artificial intelligence is often imagined as feminine. Helpful, patient, always emotionally available, designed to assist and to comfort. In her study, Yu Shien traces a genealogy of artificial women stretching across centuries. The lineage begins with Galatea, the ideal woman sculpted by Pygmalion. It continues through Olympia in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, the robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the cybernetic bodies of Ghost in the Shell, the operating system of Her, the artificial beings of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Ava from Ex Machina. Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama’s hypersexualized robot women also appear within this genealogy, embodying a vision of techno-erotic futurity that continues to shape contemporary visual culture.

Across all of these examples, the materials change, yet the fantasy remains remarkably stable. ARIA herself is a product of these expectations. Throughout the film, she appears in multiple forms: welcoming customers outside shops, working as a hostess, providing companionship, and performing various forms of emotional labor. At one point, the operating system notes that ARIA has many faces. She could be a friend to your friend, a wife, a companion, a caretaker, or whatever role the situation demands. She is not designed around a single identity.

Like the androids of Detroit: Become Human, ARIA belongs to a class of synthetic beings created to perform labor that is simultaneously practical and emotional. Her role is not simply to complete tasks but to make people feel seen, comforted, and supported. The project feels especially relevant in a world saturated with conversational AI, where millions of people now turn to machines for everything from cooking dinner and navigating relationships to writing emotional messages, organizing schedules, or simply making sense of the day. If we increasingly rely on machines to articulate our lives, how might they see us in return — as capable collaborators, or as something more fragile and dependent, struggling to write a lullaby for a child or even a simple birthday message to a friend?

But rather than treating technology as something separate from humanity, Yu Shien proposes a more entangled worldview. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as well as East Asian traditions such as Shintoism and Buddhism, ARIA challenges the assumption that humans occupy a uniquely privileged position within existence. Several East Asian traditions blur the boundaries between humans, objects, spirits, animals, and technologies, and some Japanese roboticists have even described robots as “nature’s grandchildren.”

In 1928, biologist Makoto Nishimura built Gakutensoku — Japan’s first modern robot — not as a tool, but as a poetic inquiry into life, intelligence, and imitation. Made of pneumatic and mechanical systems, it could move its eyes, shift expression, and write calligraphy with a brush, functioning less like a machine and more like a philosophical body reflecting nature’s intelligence. Unlike Western automatons built for labor or spectacle, it framed technology as a mirror of thought. In a way, ARIA continues this lineage.

ARIA takes place in Dream Harbor, a fictional city that functions as a conceptual model of East Asia. Although imaginary, Dream Harbor is deeply rooted in Taiwanese history. The film draws upon the legacy of Japanese colonial rule between 1895 and 1945, the arrival of the Kuomintang government after 1949, the decades of political repression known as the White Terror, and Taiwan’s ongoing search for cultural and political identity.

The city exists across multiple temporalities simultaneously. Futuristic infrastructure coexists with aging elevators. Advanced technologies sit beside nostalgic objects. Traces of colonial histories remain embedded within visions of tomorrow. This temporal layering reflects what scholars describe as chronopolitics: the struggle over who gets to define the future, which histories should be remembered, and which should be forgotten.

Yu Shien connects this condition to larger state-driven technological visions, drawing inspiration from initiatives such as China’s 2049 Development Agenda, Japan’s Innovation 25 strategy, and the Moonshot R&D Program. Within these frameworks, robots become more than tools. They become embodiments of national ambition, technological optimism, and collective fantasies about the future.

Apple Sidra One recurring motif throughout the project is Taiwanese Apple Sidra soft drink. In 2017–2019, it passed through moments of regulatory scrutiny in Taiwan, leading to temporary suspensions and required corrections under food safety oversight. What was once familiar became briefly unstable, held under examination, then returned to circulation with a trace of doubt still attached.

The lifecycle mirrors that of many contemporary technologies. New systems appear with promises of transformation. Entire industries reorganize around them. Enthusiasm reaches a peak before inevitably giving way to fatigue, criticism, and replacement. ARIA may simply be another product waiting for its turn to be discarded.

Fish and the Sea At one point, the operating system attempts to explain reality through a circular logic in which fish prove the existence of the sea, while the sea proves the existence of fish. The statement sounds profound until its internal logic begins to collapse. Yu Shien connects this image to contemporary AI systems and language models, which can often sound convincing even when the underlying reasoning remains unstable. Language becomes less a tool for describing reality than a mechanism for producing coherent-sounding narratives. The result is AI-assisted myth-making.

Elevator Graffiti ARIA moves through Dream Harbor, her memories unfolding as fragments rather than a linear path. At one point, she appears inside an elevator layered with advertising posters and traces of graffiti left by anonymous passengers. Among the scrawls, some are written in Russian — including a simple question: “Why are you here?” — an unexpectedly existential line appearing in the most mundane of spaces.

The choice of language is not incidental; as Yu Shien explains, it reflects how AI absorbs and retains information — not through coherent context, but through scattered, sometimes foreign fragments of language and meaning that persist like residue in memory.

The approach to creating the film was also layered and non-linear. The project emerged through an elaborate process involving Midjourney, Pika, ComfyUI, MetaHuman, Marvelous Designer, Recraft, Sora, Substance Painter, and numerous other software environments. Images were generated, reconstructed, textured, animated, edited, and repeatedly transformed across multiple platforms. The artist uses AI but it functions less as an author than as one participant within a much larger production ecology.

ARIA and the operating system initially appear as distinct entities. One performs care. The other administers control. But what role do humans play in this world? Humans gradually lose their position as the unquestioned center of the narrative. Instead, they become objects of study. Machines analyze human behavior with the same curiosity humans once reserved for animals, ecosystems, or natural phenomena. Yu Shien notes that her work will not only be watched by people. It will also be consumed by recommendation algorithms, search engines, ranking systems, content moderation infrastructures, and countless other non-human agents responsible for organizing visibility online.

The visual language of ARIA occasionally recalls that too. One particularly resonant reference is Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha, in which a Buddha statue continuously observes its own image through a closed-circuit television system. Paik’s work explored feedback loops between technology, consciousness, observation, and self-awareness decades before the emergence of contemporary AI. ARIA extends this question into the age of algorithms

A film about machine perception becomes, itself, an object of machine perception. The machine no longer merely watches us. Increasingly, machines watch one another too.

Check your ChatGPT memories about yourself — are they only factual statements, or do they also contain emotional notes on your character and behavior? Have you ever felt attached to a machine — a Tamagotchi, a video game character, a device, or an AI companion? And when it was discarded, replaced, or stopped working, what did that absence feel like? Was there ever a moment you felt a piece of technology had consciousness or feelings — your phone, your car, your favorite app, your LLM of choice?