IMAGINARIES OF MACHINE VISION.  
A Short History 
J E N S  S C H R Ö T E R  
1. INTRODUCTION 
Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in 1968. This famous film 
has been the subject of a great deal of discussion. An important aspect of the plot 
is the spaceship crew’s fight with the hyperintelligent computer “HAL”; several 
times we see HAL’s point of view. This is mostly achieved by first showing one of 
HAL’s “red eyes” (one of his cameras) and then cutting to the subjective shot, 
which is marked as the machine’s subjective point of view (or “POV”) by a fish-eye, 
circular distortion. The film thereby shows us machine vision.1 In 2001, the machine 
vision shots connote the consciousness of the supercomputer and its active role in 
the plot. As is well known, HAL becomes paranoid and attempts to kill the crew of 
the spaceship. How can we analyze this fictional machine vision? What is the role 
of such a fiction? How was it possible, as early as 1968, to think of such a kind of 
machine vision? In the second part of this paper, I will discuss some selected 
positions from the theory of technological imaginaries that might prove helpful for 
understanding such imaginary technologies. In part three, I will discuss 2001: A 
Space Odyssey. In part four, I will analyze Westworld (USA 1973, Michael 
Crichton) before examining, in part five, The Terminator (USA 1984, John 
Cameron). I will also explain the reasons for these choices. In the conclusion, I will 
provide a brief analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021). 
2. TECHNOLOGY AND IMAGINARIES: THEORIES. 
The concept of the ‘imaginary’ has a certain role in political philosophy (cf. Taylor 
2002).2 As the political scientist Benedict Anderson in particular has demonstrated, 
the “nation” is an “imagined political community – it is imagined as both inherently 
limited and sovereign” (Anderson 1983, 6). A similar imaginary component can also 
be observed in the history of technology. The history of a given technology is also 
a history of its imaginaries, which means the history of the promises and fears, 
anticipated futures and expected uses connected to it. Since there has already been 
 
1 See Branigan (1984) on a general theory of subjective shots and especially p. 105 on the 
“metaphorical POVs” in 2001 and Westworld; see Schröter (2004a) for a philosophical 
discussion on the fact that films can present subjective experience of others, an access to 
subjectivity that cannot be experienced in real life. 
2 The following is elaborated in much more detail in Ernst/Schröter (2021a). I express my 
gratitude to Christoph Ernst for writing large parts of that book. 
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a lot of research on this topic, I will limit my discussion to only a few relevant 
positions.  
The media studies scholars Simone Natale and Gabriele Balbi differentiate 
between (1) imaginaries that project future media before they emerge, (2) 
imaginaries which develop when a medium is real and new, and (3) imaginaries that 
nostalgically refer to “old” media (cf. Natale/Balbi 2014). The first case is especially 
relevant to this paper. 2001 imagines a perceiving super computer, a technology 
that did not exist at the time. In that sense, it represents a form of a “media 
prophecy” (ibid., 205–207).  
Media prophecies have existed at least since the nineteenth century, especially 
in science fiction. Science fiction is a discourse that – as Arthur C. Clarke (1962) 
noted – reaches out imaginatively into the impossible in order to determine what 
is possible. One example of this is the relationship between the history of 
computing and science fiction. For the computer scientists David L. Ferro and the 
historian Eric G. Swedin (2011), science fiction functions as a link between the 
public and the development community. Indeed, in 2001, some members of the 
community developing artificial intelligence were scientific consultants (cf. Kirby 
2003). 
On the one hand, science fiction helps us imagine computing’s possible 
consequences for society; on the other hand, it makes explicit the “needs,” that is, 
the wishes and desires, that drive development in society (cf. Ferro/Swedin 2001). 
In particular, the concept of imaginaries contains an understanding of the 
instrumentalization of science fiction as part of the “strategic” planning of possible 
futures. Today, science fiction is very consciously employed in technology 
development and product design through “science fiction prototyping” (Johnson 
2011). It is therefore interesting to observe science fiction as one site of imaginaries 
of machine vision, although it is an open question at this point if HAL in 2001 can 
be called a case of science fiction prototyping. 
The goal of science and technology studies (STS) is to study the process of the 
social production of science and technology (cf. Sismondo 2010). The role of 
imaginaries has been a matter of intense discussion in this research tradition in 
recent years (Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen 2009; McNeil et al. 2017). The term 
“sociotechnical imaginaries” developed by the historians of science Sheila Jasanoff 
and Sang-Hyun Kim (2015) is a case in point. Jasanoff (2015) regards sociotechnical 
imaginaries as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed 
visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social 
life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and 
technology.”  
The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries illuminates historical changes in 
ideas about the interplay of sociality and technology. If one compares this very 
broadly conceived concept to the concept of the Leitbild (guiding image), which is 
common in the German-speaking sociology of technology, the similarities are 
striking. Katharina Giesel writes: “Leitbilder bring together socially separated 
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(mental or verbalized) ideas of a desired or desirable and in principle achievable 
future that becomes reality though corresponding action” (Giesel 2007, 245, my 
translation). In both cases, it is a matter of analyzing the collective imagination about 
a desirable future for science and technology. The concept of “sociotechnical 
imaginaries” emphasizes the aspects of institutional safeguarding and of public 
performance (mise-en-scène, staging, presentation). Both concepts focus on the 
mediating function of imaginaries for coordinating in the development of new media 
and the social acceptance of these technologies. Therefore, one question I wish to 
address in my analyses below is: To which socio-technical imaginaries or Leitbilder 
are fictional representations of machine vision connected?3 
Since there is an emphasis on the public performance of socio-technical 
imaginaries or Leitbilder (literally: guiding images) in STS, this research specifically 
includes approaches to analyzing the media required for presenting imaginaries, 
such as theatre-like practices, e. g. stages, and other forms of “negotiation arenas” 
(Schulz-Schaeffer and Meister 2009) in which, for example, prototypes are 
choreographed and displayed (cf. Ernst and Schröter 2021b). The STS scholar Wally 
Smith has presented an approach to analyzing such presentations under the title 
“theatre of use” (Smith 2009, 449). In the IT industry, demonstrations serve to 
show hardware and software in action. In front of a heterogeneous circle of 
addressees, developers present the evidence that the technology works and is 
useful. The historical model for this is public demonstrations of scientific 
experiments (cf. ibid., 451–457). One can observe, according to Smith, a difference 
between the way significance is attributed to an experiment in the everyday 
practice of science and the significance an experiment takes on when it is publicly 
demonstrated. Using Erving Goffman’s (1974) frame analysis, now well established 
in sociology, Smith understands this as a “reframing.” Whereas a laboratory 
experiment is about representing nature, public demonstrations are about 
representing the possibilities of the technical apparatus and of the experiment itself 
(cf. Smith 2009, 456). The focus is not on what could be found out about nature in 
the future but on the future possibilities of technological feasibility (cf. ibid., 453). 
One example is the gesture control of the interface in Steven Spielberg’s science 
fiction thriller Minority Report (Spielberg 2002). The interface designer John 
Underkoffler had already developed experimental prototypes of this technology in 
reality. In Spielberg’s film, however, the interface is presented as a completely 
functional technology with idealized scenarios of possible use.  
STS scholar David Kirby refers to such phenomena as “diegetic prototypes.” 
(Kirby 2011, 193–218). Diegetic prototypes are objects that are fully functional in 
 
3 At the University of Bergen in Norway, there is an EU research project entitled “Machine 
Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, 
Narratives and Social Media”, https://www.uib.no/en/machinevision, accessed June 3, 
2022. They have built up an interesting database: https://machine-vision.no, accessed June 
3, 2022. Their research interests and publications (that can be found on the website) do 
not overlap with this paper. 
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the diegetic world constructed by the narration. In the context of imaginaries, they 
mobilize “public support for potential or emerging technologies by establishing the 
need, benevolence, and viability of these technologies” (ibid., 18). We can 
summarize Kirby’s arguments regarding the representation of imaginary 
technologies in a film in the following four points: 
1. Performative artifacts: The objects demonstrate the possibilities of an 
emerging technology; 
2. Social contextualization: The objects are situated by the narrative in a social 
context; for instance, they are associated with a community of users; 
3. Normalized approach: The objects are presented as completely normal 
objects and their use as completely ‘natural;’ 
4. Real need: The technology is framed in such a way that the film may trigger 
a real need for these objects. 
The popular science fiction film is a widespread and influential example of such 
presentations. Science fiction films are conveyors of technology and media for 
reflecting on the technological change that is taking place. What “theatres of use” 
and “diegetic prototypes” can we find in representations of machine vision? 
In the following sections I will to return the fictional representation of machine 
vision in 2001, but will also consider other examples of an imaginary machine vision 
in science fiction and analyze them in their respective contexts. How is machine 
vision represented? Which socio-technical imaginaries are connected to it? Can we 
find Kirby’s different aspects in the filmic representations? 
3.  1968: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
[Fig. 1: HAL’s gaze] 
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In 1960, one of the earliest papers on machine vision was published: “Pattern 
Recognition by Machine” by Oliver G. Selfridge and Ulric Neisser. It appeared in 
Scientific American – in a journal, then, that popularized current scientific 
knowledge. The paper opens with the following passage: 
Can a machine think? The answer to this old chestnut is certainly yes: 
Computers have been made to play chess and checkers, to prove 
theorems, to solve intricate problems of strategy. Yet the intelligence 
implied by such activities has an elusive, unnatural quality. It is not based 
on any orderly development of cognitive skills. In particular, the 
machines are not well equipped to select from their environment the 
things, or the relations, they are going to think about (Selfridge and 
Neisser 1960, 60). 
In other words, the machine needs a capability for perception or, as the authors 
put it, pattern recognition. Although the text focuses on the recognition of printed 
and handwritten characters, this is clearly a case of machine vision. Interestingly, 
they start with the question of “thinking machines”, which had been a somewhat 
fashionable topic in computer science since the Dartmouth Conference of 1956. 
Through popularizations such as Selfridge and Neisser’s text, “artificial intelligence” 
had become a well-known theme (an “old chestnut”) by the end of the 1960s. 
Indeed, one of the protagonists of the Dartmouth Conference, the computer 
scientist Marvin Minsky, was a scientific consultant to 2001. He is especially known 
for advocating a modular concept of mind in which different specialized “modules” 
interact to produce “intelligence” (cf. Minsky 1988).4 One such module is 
perception. The staging of the supercomputer HAL as possessing the ability to 
understand and produce spoken language, to play games, to plan, and to see shows 
his intelligence to be of such a modular kind.5  
We can state that machine vision appears in 2001 in the context of a movie 
that tries to be scientifically accurate about (a certain modular conception of) AI.6 
HAL’s POV is staged as a ‘normal’ view (it looks like the POVs of the human actors, 
as compared to other more technologized POVs I will discuss below), except for 
the fact that it has a circular form that mimics the circular form of his red “eyes”, 
which are dispersed all over the spaceship (Fig. 1). At the time, there were certainly 
not any digital tricks available for staging his POV (as compared to the machinic 
POV in Westworld 1973, see below), but it would of course have been possible to 
 
4 This book was published twenty years after 2001. 
5 See Mateas (2006, 107): “Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of AI, served as a technical 
consultant for the film: doubtless his contribution helped to establish the strong resonance 
between the depiction of HAL and subfields within AI, including language, commonsense 
reasoning, computer vision [!], game playing and planning, and problem solving.” See also 
Stork (1997). 
6 See Rosenfeld (1997) for a detailed analysis of the representation of machine vision in 2001 
from the standpoint of a – leading – practitioner in the field. 
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defamiliarize HAL’s view in some other ways. Staging it as very similar to the point-
of-view shots of the human protagonists would have been a very plausible means 
to show HAL’s intelligence as comparable to that of humans – and it also implies 
self-awareness on the part of the super computer.  
I now wish to systematically apply Kirby’s methodological steps for analyzing 
diegetic prototypes: 
(1) Performative artifacts: 2001 demonstrates the possibilities of an emerging 
technology, AI. But as Kirby underlines, to work as a diegetic prototype, a 
technology has to be shown to work flawlessly– and that is of course what the film 
does not do. As is well known, HAL becomes paranoid and kills the crew (with the 
exception of Dave, who, in the end, shuts HAL down). This is first and foremost 
for dramaturgical reasons, of course, because an antagonist is needed (as in 
Westworld, see below). However, to stay with Kirby’s reasoning, it demonstrates 
that the film does not intend to arouse interest in and acceptance of AI. AI is simply 
presupposed to be a real technology in a distant (or not so distant: 2001) future 
and to have ambiguous implications. Machine vision in this context can be read as 
a potentially dangerous technology of surveillance – think of the scene in which 
HAL reads the astronauts’ lips to thwart their plans.  
(2) Social contextualization: In 2001, the mission has a scientific character, but 
it seems also to have a hidden military background, since the astronauts were not 
fully informed about its real purpose. This points to real developments: as Yarden 
Katz points out, there was a memo at the “MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, one of 
the first academic AI laboratories (cofounded by Minsky), written in July 1966. The 
memo, authored by Seymour Papert, describes plans to build – in the scope of one 
summer – an artificial vision system that could recognize objects.” Furthermore, he 
adds: “Practitioners had some reason for optimism: the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ 
charmed the Pentagon’s elites, and they poured money into the field” (Katz 2020, 
24). Finally, Katz notes that “AI’s subfields were from the start organized around a 
militaristic frame: vision research to detect ‘enemy’ ships and spot resources of 
interest from satellite images […]” (ibid., 35). These real developments informed 
the film, which hints at a special community of users in high science and the military, 
and locates machine vision in this context – and HAL (be he paranoid or not) indeed 
tries to kill the astronauts in a ruthless, military manner to secure the mission. 
(3) Normalized approach: For the astronauts it is quite normal to 
communicate with HAL and to accept that he has a kind of vision. In one scene, 
HAL asks astronaut Dave Bowman to show him a drawing he has done. Dave 
complies and HAL comments on the drawing.7 Machine vision is normalized – at 
least for special users like astronauts. Nonetheless, this technology is not safe: The 
gaze of the AI turns out to be a terrorizing instrument of control. The AI indeed 
ends up killing most of the crew, an outcome that foreshadows contemporary 
 
7 The scene can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jeJk63XYPg, accessed 
June 3, 2022. 
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discussions about the danger of autonomous weapon systems that have capabilities 
of perception and select targets to destroy them. In not only normalizing but 
subsequently showing the dangers of AI, the film ultimately departs from Kirby’s 
typology, since, for Kirby, “movies can show audiences how a technology works, 
why it is safe and why they need it” (Kirby 2010, 45). 
(4) Real need: Since HAL and its capabilities are located in a special, high 
science, space travel, and at least implicitly military context, it does not correspond 
or coincide with real-life needs, such as those of the audience, for instance. Machine 
vision is presented/interpreted as removed from ordinary life. 
As Michael Mateas notes, the figuration of HAL turned out to be a quite 
powerful socio-technical imaginary: “As a representation, HAL, and the role he 
plays within 2001, both captures preexisting intellectual currents that were already 
operating with the field of AI and serves as an influential touchstone, which has had 
a profound impact on individual AI practitioners and on the aspirations of the field” 
(Mateas 2006, 105). The idea of machine vision was connected, at an early juncture, 
with the ambiguous idea – unrealized to this day – of a general artificial intelligence. 
4.  1973: WESTWORLD 
 
 
 
 
 
 
[Fig. 2: Subjective of the Gunslinger robot] 
 
In 1973 Westworld was released, a science fiction movie directed by Michael 
Crichton. It presents a different scenario than 2001. The “Westworld” is a kind of 
high-tech amusement park in which guests can play, often transgressively, with 
lifelike androids in different historical settings. Then a malfunction happens: The 
security measures fail and the androids become a serious threat to the guests. The 
antagonist, an artificial gunslinger played by Yul Brynner, kills one guest, chases 
another, but can be defeated at the end. The historical background informing the 
film is similar to that of 2001: “Artificial intelligence” was a widespread – albeit 
controversial – topic in 1973. The idea of self-acting robots was not completely 
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alien. But Westworld adds some new twists to the picture. To illustrate this, I turn, 
again, to Kirby’s scheme: 
(1) Performative artifacts: In Westworld, machine vision is connected not to 
an all-seeing AI but to an always situated robot that is, on the one hand, very limited 
compared to HAL. This robot is only a gunslinger and completely reduced to that 
task – in that sense he is an imaginary representation of a “narrow AI” compared 
to HAL, which is an imaginary representation of a “general AI” (cf. Dyer-Witheford, 
Kjøsen and Steinford 2019, 10–15). On the other hand, the machine is able to move 
and, therefore, to chase the protagonist, showing working robotics at play. In this 
context we see the POV of the robot, its machine vision, several times (Fig. 2).8 
While HAL is an image of a symbolic AI, the gunslinger in Westworld is an embodied 
AI. Machine vision is constructed here as robots’ means of orienting themselves in 
space. Interestingly, Westworld is now considered to be the first film in which 
digitally processed images were used to present the robot’s POV. Computer 
graphics pioneer John Whitney Jr. writes:  
When I met Brent Sellstrom, the post-production supervisor of 
Westworld, he had a problem: to find a technique to represent, on film, 
the point of view of a machine. The script called for the audience to see 
the world as a robot gunfighter, played by Yul Brynner, saw it. This 
‘Robot POV’ was supposed to consist of a series of animated colored 
rectangles. It could not be done by any known special-effects 
technique. Something new was required (Whitney Jr. 2020).9  
Yet, he adds:  
It occurred to me that the scanning digitizing methods employed by 
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on their Mariner Mars flybys could 
be used here. Basically, in this system, an image is broken down into a 
series of points, and the gray-scale value for each point determined. A 
numerical value can then be assigned to each point, and a new image 
reconstituted electronically. Similar techniques have been devised in 
computer science to enable computers to ‘read’ handwriting, X-rays, 
seismic data, and so on. It is the kind of technology that allows a 
computer to tell the difference between a ‘P’ and an ‘R’ (ibid.).10  
 
8 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nILKFlpOZi0, accessed June 3, 2022 for a 
compilation of machine vision scenes from Westworld. 
9 Whitney Jr. (together with Saul Bass) also created the very famous graphic title sequence of 
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, USA 1958), the first ever computer graphic sequence in 
cinema (cf. McCormack 2013). 
10 The details of the cumbersome process are provided in detail in that article. See also ASC 
Staff (2020). 
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Ultimately, Whitney had to use another approach than that deployed by NASA, for 
simple reasons of cost. Yet the images representing the machine vision in 
Westworld refer to the history of the digitization of images, which would turn out 
to be very important not only for science, space travel etc. (cf. Schröter 2004b) but 
also, as he explicitly states, for the history of pattern recognition, that is: machine 
vision itself. The POV shots of the robot not only represent the vision of a machine 
but are actually made with technologies that finally led to machine vision. 
(2) Social contextualization: Contrary to 2001, the plot of Westworld shows 
the advanced technology of machine vision not in space travel and in a scientific 
and/or military context, but in a future form of entertainment. In that sense, it 
connects machine vision with the not unusual transfer of technologies from the 
military to the civil realm. Indeed, Whitney Jr. was known for “creating animation 
with military-surplus analog electronics and motor assemblies” (Price 2013).11 On 
the level of content, as on that of material production (at least concerning Whitney’s 
earlier work, before he did special effects), the film presents the transfer of military 
technological inventions to civil entertainment.  
(3) Normalized approach: Westworld describes a future in which it will be 
normal (at least if you have enough money) to interact with robots that can see. 
The gunslinger is a slave-like robot designed for a very specific task that then breaks 
out of his assigned role, not in an act of conscious rebellion, however, but as a result 
of technical failure. Again, advanced technology is imagined as a potential threat. 
(4) Real need: In Westworld, the socio-technical imaginary of future 
entertainment is modeled after Disneyworld: going to a special place, a theme park, 
and para-socially interacting with fictional, but tangible and in that sense virtual 
characters in fictional scenarios. The real need for an ever-expanding entertainment 
industry foreshadows its own future. Such robot parks are still far from becoming 
real, even if a contemporary television series directly based on Westworld 
refreshes this imaginary.12 Perhaps this will never become a real practice, yet 
narrow AIs – like the robot in Westworld – are in fact already widespread today. 
While robots have mostly non-anthropomorphic forms and are used in industry, 
simple AI systems possessing the ability to recognize visual and aural patterns are 
to be found in Alexa or Siri or in the face recognition systems of modern iPhones. 
Westworld introduced digitally processed images and their digital look to 
audiences and links this electronic POV to a robotlike, narrow AI. The rhetoric of 
such technological-looking images is well established today. Machine vision 
appeared/emerged in Westworld in a context of entertainment, mirroring the then 
slowly nascent transfer of computer technologies, originally developed by high 
science and the military, into entertainment and, finally, everyday life. 
 
11 See also McCormack (2013). 
12 Westworld (Nolan and Joy 2016). 
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5. 1984: THE TERMINATOR  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
[Fig. 3: Subjective of the Terminator] 
 
This dissemination of computing began in the late 1970s with the 
creation/foundation of companies such as Microsoft and Apple. One popular 
computer was the Apple II, released in April 1977. In 1984, The Terminator 
(directed by James Cameron) opened in the US cinemas. It told the story of a robot, 
the “terminator”, who is sent from the future to kill the mother (Sarah Connor, 
played by Linda Hamilton) of the future leader of the resistance against the tyranny 
of artificial intelligence in that same future. A human fighter, played by Michael 
Biehn, is sent back too and tries to protect the mother. He then falls in love with 
her, they have sex – and become the parents of the coming leader.  
What is the connection to the diffusion of early home and personal 
computing?13 The subjective POV of the robot from the future is, different from 
the POVs in 2001 and Westworld, overlayed with diagrams and snippets of 
computer code to make it look more robot-like (Fig. 3). The code snippets are 
from 6502 assembler code, which was the exact code used in the Apple II.14 The 
snippets were taken from the home and personal computer hobbyist journal 
Nibbles.15 The 6502 processor and its close relative, the 6510, were also used in 
 
13 On the history of early home and personal computing, see Haddon (1988, especially pp. 
23–24 for the Apple II). 
14 See a compilation of POV scenes from all the Terminator films: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZlEiD6Nmnc, accessed June 3, 2022. 
15 E. g. Manly (1984, 52); Peterson (1984, 40); Efflandt (1984, 89). Since the last two examples 
are from the September issue of the journal Nibble and since The Terminator was 
released in the US on October 26, 1984, it seems that the POV shots with the snippets 
of the code were filmed very late and shortly before release. 
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other popular computers of the time, such as the Commodore VIC 20 and the 
Commodore C64 (cf. Bagnall 2011). We again use Kirby’s scheme: 
(1) Performative artifacts: As in Westworld, we are shown a robot which has 
astounding capabilities but is more limited than HAL. He has only one purpose: 
killing Sarah Connor. What is more important is that the machine vision of the 
terminator shows the visual field overlayed with information. This prefigures the 
now widespread idea of “augmented reality” (AR) (cf. Schröter 2011). Viewed from 
a contemporary perspective, the robot’s POV displays the enhanced and 
augmented POV of today’s computer users avant la lettre. It shows the successful 
performance of an AR system. Moreover, since the Apple II had been available since 
1977, and insofar as many users would have known the 6502 code (although most 
of them presumably programmed in easier higher programming languages), the 
POV also references another, well-performing, technology: home and personal 
computers of the time.  
(2) Social contextualization: Machine vision is shown in a warlike and therefore 
military context. The robot from the future means the threat of hyperintelligent AI 
exterminating mankind. In that context, machine vision is, somewhat similar to 
Westworld, but on a much larger scale, conceptualized as a predatory and even 
genocidal gaze – a dystopian scenario that is still influential today, for instance when 
world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking warns against AI (cf. Cellan-Jones 
2014).16 
(3) Normalized approach: The scenario is obviously different from 2001 and 
Westworld. The technology is not normal, but comes as a deadly threat from a 
distant future. However, the film does make it seem to be normal for advanced AI 
to use killer robots. 
(4) Real need: Although it may reasonably seem like there is no meaningful 
need for dangerous killer robots, there is actually a lot of research on autonomous 
weapon systems conducted by the military. Terminator, in that sense, can be seen 
as metaphorically representing the automatization of warfare and the role of 
machine vision as a technology for identifying targets (cf. Virilio 1994; Queisner 
2017). Furthermore, the imaginary technology presented in Terminator is removed 
from Kirby’s notion of the “diegetic prototype”:  
Diegetic prototypes differ substantially from what I term ‘speculative 
scenarios’ in movies […]. Speculative scenarios represent highly 
implausible and impractical situations and technologies that film-makers 
and science consultants imbue with a sheen of plausibility, so that they 
look possible within a film’s narrative. They make these technologies 
look plausible, knowing that they are impossible to achieve in real life. 
(Kirby 2010, 46)  
 
16 On other dystopian AI scenarios, see Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen and Steinford (2019, ch. 3). 
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Although Terminator surely has no direct influence on the socio-technical 
imaginaries or Leitbilder of technological development (compared to HAL from 
2001), it was influential in an aesthetic way. With its representation of the machine 
POV as images overlayed with diagrams and code, Terminator, just like 
Westworld’s pixilated and ‘technical look,’ has shaped the aesthetic of imaginary 
machine vision to this day. The sequels to Terminator contain machine POVs that 
further modify and extend the aesthetics developed in the initial movie. 
Interestingly, the idea of integrating information snippets in the machine vision was 
already present in the production of Westworld:  
Crichton was concerned from the outset with how to give a distinct 
look to the gunslinger’s point of view when the audience saw events 
through its eyes. Five years earlier, Stanley Kubrick had used a wide-
angle lens to show the perceptions of [HAL] 9000, the troubled 
computer of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ Crichton, however, wanted his 
villain’s perspective to look like that of an electronic machine. His script 
described it as a bizarre, ‘computerized image of the world’ with 
‘flashed-up calculated figures’ (Price 2013). 
6. A CONCLUSION WITH KAZUO ISHIGURO’S KLARA AND THE SUN 
What the three films analyzed have in common is that they have shaped the 
imaginary of machine vision. All subsequent representations in films and television 
basically resemble their aesthetic and thematic construction of the POV of 
machines. Through numerous films and television series, the idea of a machine POV 
(and the associated idea of machine consciousness) has become well established in 
popular culture and part of our socio-technical imaginaries and media prophecies. 
The idea of a machine POV and the associated idea of machine consciousness 
is so well known that today it can even be found in highbrow literature, normally 
far removed from science fiction. A remarkable example is the novel Klara and the 
Sun (2021) by Nobel Prize (2017) winner Kazuo Ishiguro. The story is narrated 
from the point of view of a so-called “artificial friend” (AF), a highly developed 
robotic, female-connotated AI system named Klara. She is a kind of robot puppet 
that can be bought as a companion for children. The machine is thus associated 
with “female” values such as care – in contrast to the “male-connotated” computer 
systems discussed above.17 Klara tries to understand the world in her own way. 
The details of the wonderful and deeply moving plot need not be discussed here. 
Suffice it to emphasize, first, that AI is represented not according to today’s 
stereotyped representations as either a slave or a threat (except for the fact that 
many people in the story world are “post-employed” due to technical progress18), 
 
17 This embeds Klara in a history of female-connotated robots in film, e.g. Her (USA 2013, 
Spike Jonze). 
18 On AI and labor, see Dyer-Witheford, Kjøsen and Steinford (2019, ch. 1 and 2). 
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but as a loving friend and companion. Second, since the book is centered around 
Klara’s subjective experience, it is also centered around her visual (and aural) 
perception. At the very beginning, where she is presented in a store window and 
object of the customers’ gaze, we read: “I should confess here that for me, there’d 
always been another reason for wanting to be in the window […] Unlike most AFs 
[…] I’d always longed to see more of the outside – and to see it in all its detail” 
(Ishiguro 2021, 6).19 Many passages in the narration emphasize the way she visually 
perceives the world and it becomes obvious that Klara’s field of vision is 
technologically pixilated in a way that resembles the POVs in Westworld: “The 
mother leaned closer over the tabletop and her eyes narrowed till her face filled 
eight boxes, leaving only the peripheral boxes for the waterfall, and for a moment 
it felt to me her expression varied between one box and the next” (ibid., 104). Her 
field of vision is somehow structured in “boxes.” Later on, Klara has some problems 
with her eyesight:  
I’d thought that once I was no longer observing them through glass, the 
theater people would become more distinct. But now I was in their 
midst, their figures became more simplified, as if constructed out of 
cones and cylinders made from smooth card. Their clothes, for 
instance, were devoid of the usual creases and folds, and even their 
faces under the streetlight appeared to have been created by cleverly 
placing flat surfaces into complex arrangements to create a sense of 
contouring (ibid., 235).  
If the idea that machines can see, like the recent iPhones that can recognize our 
faces, has become a well-established topic, it is because more than fifty years of 
socio-technical imaginaries of machine vision have accustomed us to the idea that 
vision is no longer the privilege of higher biological life forms alone.  
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IMAGE INDEX  
Fig. 1: Taken from the Film 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick 1968). 
Fig. 2: Taken from the Film Westworld (Crichton 1973). 
Fig. 3: Taken from the Film The Terminator (Cameron 1984). 
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