“The Creation of Ava” is named after “The Creation of Adam,” to highlight the whitewashing and colonialistic aspects of both Christianity and Ex Machina. I took inspiration from an unexplained, muted scene of Ex Machina which furthers colorism, including whitepassing and color-blindness, and created a still image that displays how technofeminism promotes and supports the model-minority myth of East Asians, which itself underpins black racism.
Ava pauses in front of a deactivated East Asian body, Jade, in a cabinet. Ava replaces her broken arm with Jade’s and grafts Jade’s skin to her body; ironically, Ava is still white, despite having the skin and an arm from a different race. Filters are often applied (bringing down the exposure and adding a brownish-orange filter) to minimize the difference in the brightness of their skin, while the tone remains slightly different: green undertones were used for Jade’s face and pinkish-red undertones for the grafted skin on Ava. This is problematic as the movie expects the audience to turn a blind eye to color and racial diversity by casting only the light-skinned East Asian actresses as disposable, artificial female bodies.
White supremacists judge model minorities, Asian-Americans, by their academic success. Not only do they overlook the economic, intellectual growth of America brought by selectively recruited highly-educated Asian immigrants, they also use Asian Americans as an example supporting the concept of “success-driven-by-hard-work” to perpetuate anti-black racism. This forces the flawed expectation on Black Americans that they must work hard and overcome centuries of slavery, the history of black female bodies being raped and put on display pre and post-mortem, systemic dehumanization and lynching, and police brutality in order to contribute to society. Binary classification of white and non-white promotes the misconception that all racial groups are monolithic, failing to recognize that white supremacy utilizes different forms of racism against varied ethnic, racial, and cultural groups.
