Hadaly

“The Android, as we've said, is only the first hours of Love, immobilized, the hour of the ideal made eternal prisoner…

Within this new work of art a creature from beyond the reach of Humanity has insinuated herself and now lurks there at the heart of the mystery, a power unimagined before our time.

I have come with this message: since our gods and our aspirations are no longer anything but scientific, why shouldn't our loves be so too?”

Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

De Villiers De L’Isle Adam’s novel Tomorrow’s Eve is a 19th century tour de force of misogynous, visionary, science fiction. Now that human relations are increasingly digitized and love is found through data sets and criteria lists, via mechanical interfaces and behind masks of, sometimes imaginary, online profiles, Hadaly, Adam’s Android, has finally been modified for mass production. In Japanese the word Otaku describes a man who prefers virtual reality to sex. While 19th century literature was obsessed with Galatea, the fake but perfect female, the 21st has made the mechanical bride a thing of real ecstasy, no longer a tale of moral and intellectual bankruptcy. The cutting and stitching of skin, the sucking and shaping of living flesh and the caressing of the sensuous silicon ‘real doll’ lets the replica emerge victorious in the post-feminist, post-analogue age, into a dictature of hybridization and obsolescence.