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Alex Garland's Ex Machina (2015) explores both long-standing discourses about artificial intelligence and more recent concerns about automation, surveillance, and big data. It does so by associating AI creation not solely with science, technology, and religion but also with the history of art and, more reflexively, with film itself. In this way, the film becomes an allegory for its own production, a story about representation and the creation of artificial film worlds by new technological means. This reflexivity underscores cinema's important role in popular discourses about technological change, a role it has long served as a “technocritical art.” AI films like Ex Machina suggest that this role is changing as film enters not just the digital age but also what W.J.T. Mitchell terms the age of biocybernetics.

We have successfully fabricated high-quality and high-current density (Jc≊4 000 A/cm2) superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) junctions on freestanding thin (∼1 μm) silicon nitride (SiN) membranes. These devices can be used in a novel millimeter-wave and THz receiver system which is made using micromachining. The SIS junctions with planar antennas were fabricated first on a silicon wafer covered with a SiN membrane, the Si wafer underneath was then etched away using an anisotropic KOH etchant. The current-voltage characteristics of the SIS junctions remained unchanged after the whole process, and the junctions and the membrane survived thermal cycling.