Lains
Table of Contents
Gallery of Generated Lains
While Evangelion highlights the technology of the animation medium itself to call our notions of reality into question, Serial Experiments Lain presents its viewers with an animated world in which technology, specifically the computer, both creates and deconstructs reality. While the EVA in Evangelion is essentially anthropomorphized, a concrete Other that is, initially at least, a necessary part of the characters’ identities, the “machine” in Lain is invisible, part of a world known as the Wired in which the machine not only supports but literally constructs identity. This premise leads both characters and viewers on a darkly surreal adventure into a virtual house of mirrors where identities shift, disappear, and reformulate and where death and life are refigured to create a disorienting and disquieting vision of a very near future.
– Susan Napier, When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain
For The Rest of my Life I'm Junk, Whatever
The Summit of Babel, Reached Through Skill
Surrounded by Beautiful Blue Light
a loner, living in the castle's ruins, trying to reconcile past and present
The worldly desires I wish would disappear seem to have survived after all, survived after all!!
I don't care about the night I don't like
If I don't know the words I've lost, I'll climb aboard the local train
The fourteenth me laughs. There's no "real" you, right?1
Surely I've exceeded expectations
(a million little red colored death blows)
I DON'T GET THE MESSAGES, THEY DON'T COME TO ME
We could've had another friendly bout; now I won't stop until you spit your teeth out
Let's change the world for the better
My life depends on making it work with what I've got
Going through the motions, working myself to death
Glory to dog, truly deviated from the norm, I'm so fly
Sometimes, all I think about is you
Caught in a stitch of what could be
Escaping from your purpose is impossible
Post Scriptum
AI, and image generation in particular, is a highly reviled technology. The form that revulsion takes is often hazy and ill-defined: an amalgamation of various reasons like environmental concerns, copyright infringement even when paying for copies of the works, fears that these tools will replace jobs, assertions that the outputs of these models are terrible, and so on.
Levelheaded discussion about the relevant facts is often extremely difficult to navigate. What I am hoping to explore in Gallery of Generated Lains is the thesis that this detestation is not about the issues per se, but rather about the identity and reality constructed by the machine.
Lain as a character well-suited to represent the increasingly autonomous, vaguely-sentient-ish computer-powered systems of the current day. Her personality in Serial Experiments Lain is splintered into several competing identities which increasingly cease to resemble what we view as "the original Lain." You could conclude that Lain can be anything or anyone; that she can assume any identity feasible to construct inside the machine. This is simultaneously the thing about Lain which is the most powerful and also the most horrifying – an Omnipresence in the Wired, a swarm of distinct selves which have no knowledge or connection to their others aside from a common origin in their identities.
A major theme of the gallery is the idea that Lain is unwanted in each of these scenes, that her connection to any particular identity exists entirely as a photocopy of some other idea. The unrequitedness of Lain's presence in any piece of art, each constructed via a widely hated technology, mirrors the loneliness of omnipresence. Lain can be anywhere, and anyone, but her presence anywhere can itself be upsetting.
In Serial Experiments Lain, Lain cannot cope with her role in the dissolution between the Wired and consensus reality. She erases herself from consensus reality, and the narrative rewards her for this by depicting the happiness of others in a world where she never existed. But in our reality, things cannot be un-existed. Perhaps even lonelier than this fantasy of resetting consensus reality is being forced to continue existing, bouncing between identities for eternity.