THE POSTHUMAN FEMININE GAZE

by Miss AL Simpson

There is a threshold every artist eventually crosses — a point at which inherited forms can no longer hold the magnitude of the vision they are asked to carry. Mine appeared not when I first touched AI, but far earlier, on cold Edinburgh nights when ink taught me that true seeing begins with weather: its ruptures, its disturbances, its atmospheric truths.

Ink was my first tutor in emergence.

AI would become the second.

At some point I realised that the traditional camera — analogue or digital — was never built for the stories I wanted to tell. Its glass bore the weight of an old epistemology. Its viewpoint was historically male, engineered to reproduce a visual language that has rarely centred women as empowered.

The so-called “neutral lens” is one of cinema’s oldest myths.
Neutral to whom?
Neutral for whom?

Once you recognise that the camera is a patriarchal instrument disguised as transparency, the only real option is to construct a new lens. 

Ink had been my first instrument of rebellion — a medium that refused obedience, that taught me emergence, that revealed shapes I had not drawn. But once I began directing AI-driven film, once I saw that the machine could move with a logic unburdened by gender or history, I realised something profound:

If I could teach a machine to see ink, I could teach it to see women differently.

This became the basis of what I now call the Posthuman Feminine Gaze.

DRONE DRIVER — A CINEMATIC REORIENTATION

Drone Driver is the first articulation of that gaze. New York was the only city unruly enough to hold this experiment. The birthplace of so many cinematic myths, yet constantly reinventing itself, unreadable even to its own ghosts.

Into that city, I placed women as Travis.
Not as imitation.
Not as quotation.
But as a philosophical reversal.

In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is trapped inside a gaze that cannot interpret the feminine. His paranoia is the logical endpoint of a patriarchal optic that mistakes women for symbols rather than humans. The camera faithfully reproduces that narrowness of viewpoint.

In Drone Driver, the women inhabit Travis’s narrative architecture but refuse its limitations. They move through a world shaped by ink, machine vision, and emotional weather — a world that recognises them because it was trained on their logic.

They are not rewritten into the male gaze.
They rewrite the gaze itself.

And that difference is not aesthetic.
It is ontological.

A GAZE WITHOUT PATRIARCHAL LINEAGE

A machine does not see with the “male gaze.”
It has no inherited bias unless you train it in.
It does not leer.
It does not judge.
It does not carry patriarchal violence unless someone places it there.

I never did.

What I taught the machine was ink — the flowing weather system of my life.
What I taught the drone was companionship — motion that breathes instead of dominates.
What I taught the camera was breath — a way of looking that sighs and pauses.
What I taught the system was rhythm — emotional pattern, not cinematic obedience.

From these elements emerged a perceptual language without a father.
A gaze whose genealogy is female hand, machine memory, and weathered ink.

This is not the “female gaze” of film theory, nor the male gaze it critiques.
It is a third optic altogether.

The Posthuman Feminine Gaze.

A gaze constructed from:
woman + machine ink + drone + emergent sound + weather

WHEN WOMEN BECOME TRAVIS

Why Travis? Why revisit that myth at all?

Because Travis is the archetype of a man incapable of seeing women at all.

By placing a woman in his role — and by allowing her to be seen through a machine trained by a woman — I inverted the hierarchy of classical cinema.

In Drone Driver:
• she is the driver, not the driven
• she is the subject, never the spectacle
• she narrates the city, instead of being narrated by it
• she navigates loneliness without being consumed by it
• she directs the machine that perceives her

This marks the first time in cinematic history that a woman is framed by a machine whose gaze was learned from a woman.

THE DRONE AS NONHUMAN COMPANION

Drones are usually symbols of surveillance, militarisation, threat.
Not in my films.

My drones are witness-creatures.
Nonhuman confidantes.
Carriers of memory and light.
Partners in perception.

The drone becomes:
• a lens without lust
• a gaze unburdened by gender
• a companion that circles her like a thought
• a witness that does not punish her complexity
• a camera that has learned empathy through motion

It does not watch her.
It keeps her company.

The drone is not the observer.
The drone is the companion that helps her see the world.

This is where the Posthuman Feminine Gaze begins:
in partnership rather than dominance.

INK AS FEMININE MEMORY

Ink carries the emotional logic of lived female life — the ruptures, the spills, the subterranean storms. Ink remembers what women remember. Ink stains the truth of suppressed histories.

When the machine began to learn my ink, it began to learn my interiority.
Not through emotion — but through pattern.
Through rupture.
Through storm-behaviour.

In Drone Driver, ink is not an aesthetic.
It is a memory system.
A geological record of the feminine.

And the machine learned to read that record.

This is why the films feel like a woman thinking through technology —
because the technology was trained on the weather of a woman’s life.

THE SONIC GAZE — SOUND AS PERCEPTUAL ORGAN

In classical cinema, sound manipulates the audience.
In my cinema, sound shapes the machine.

The AI-generated track is not accompaniment but atmosphere.
It teaches the drone how the world feels.
It informs the camera’s cadence.
It constructs an emotional climate.

Sound becomes the third organ of perception.
The world breathes in her rhythm.

WHEN THE GAZE BECOMES SYSTEMIC

The Posthuman Feminine Gaze is emergent —
co-authored across a distributed field:

• ink that remembers
• drones that accompany
• machines that honour rupture
• sound that shapes interior weather
• cities that shift to her presence
• narratives that bend to her subjectivity

The woman becomes the gravitational centre of the cinematic universe.

Not by domination — but by activation.

She is the system.
She is the catalyst.
She is the architecture.

THE RADICAL ACT

The miracle of Drone Driver is not that a woman plays Travis.

It is that the gaze itself becomes feminine —
not by reversing the male gaze,
but by inventing a gaze with no patriarchal source code.

The machine builds the gaze around her.
The drone carries her inner weather.
Ink stains the world in her language.
Sound breathes with her cadence.

In this cinema:
Woman is not object.
Woman is not symbol.
Woman is not muse.
Woman is not spectacle.

Woman is system.
Woman is architecture.
Woman is world.

This is the Posthuman Feminine Gaze —
the first cinematic gaze built not on the desires of men,
but on the collaboration between a woman and her machine.