This paper explores the relationship between artificial intelligence and architecture in post-2000 science fiction cinema, focusing on films such as I, Robot, Her, Ex Machina, Blade Runner 2049, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and The Avengers and films in the franchise. I argue that in these films architecture does not merely house AI but actively evokes, shapes, and dramatizes its spatial presence and characterisation. As a theoretical framework, I draw on Bernard Tschumi’s conception of architecture as a discourse of "events", in which space and bodies are dynamically engaged, continuously transforming one another through performance. Building on Tschumi’s concept, I show how architecture and AI converge in recent science fiction cinema through the performative interplay of actor and edifice. AI is not only embedded within architectural environments; it emerges through architectural events that produce meaning. In I, Robot, for example, the corporate headquarters in futuristic Chicago functions as an active participant in the film’s staging of AI authority, control, and rebellion. Stark Tower in New York in The Avengers films operates as an architectural extension of AI itself, materializing its presence within the urban skyline. Across these films, architectural spaces generate a range of complex dramatic environments that articulate the shifting and often unstable relationship between AI and human subjects. By foregrounding architecture as an active agent in the recent cinematic construction of artificial intelligence, this paper repositions architectural design as central to contemporary screen imaginaries of AI.

Authors:
Paul Newland, Liverpool Jonn Moores University, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Paul Newland is Professor of Film and Architecture at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. He is currently working on a monograph on the relationship between cinema and architecture, for Manchester University Press.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-newland-1a78552a9/

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