In “Samantha,” artist Yuen transforms her archive of personal photographs into a meditation on female identity, aging, and artificial intelligence. The film weaves together completion and resignation in life with a darkly humorous taxonomy of female life stages, from “spooky baby” to “witch woman whose house the children run past.” Through AI technology, photographs become uncanny digital performances delivering intimate confessions about body image and self-improvement, while exploring the experience of “falling into” and “getting out of” women who are “not human.” The film takes a meta turn when it references various AI and robot characters from popular media, suggesting a parallel between these fictional artificial women and the AI-generated images of the artist herself. As versions of Yuen’s younger self converse with AI-generated “unrealpersons,” the film creates tension between authentic identity and artificial representation, critiquing how technology can transform, fragment, and reconstruct personal identity.
