ARIA: A User Manual is an artist book that extends the world of the CGI animated short film ARIA.
The book documents selected visuals from the film, its creative process, worldbuilding, research background, and core concepts. Designed as a speculative manual rather than a conventional film catalogue, it examines how gender, memory, surveillance, and technological futures are encoded into artificial bodies.
The publication functions as both an archive and an object: a way to encounter ARIA beyond the screen, through printed images, production materials, and conceptual fragments.
* Why “A User Manual”? The format of a “user manual” is used critically. It refers to systems of instruction, operation, maintenance, and control. In the context of ARIA, the manual becomes a speculative document for reading an artificial body: how it is designed, trained, observed, used, and eventually discarded.
ARIA is a CGI animated short film and computational cinema project exploring gendered AI, machine vision, East Asian futurism, and the inheritance of historical structures. Set in Dream Harbor, a fictional East Asian smart city in 2050, the film follows ARIA, a female AI agent on the verge of deactivation and disposal as e-waste. As she transforms into a virtual being, she enters into a final conversation with her supervisory operating system. Through this dialogue, ARIA reflects on how technology is shaped by unresolved histories, gendered design, surveillance systems, and national dreams of progress. The work uses game-engine cinema and speculative narrative to question how futures are coded, remembered, and controlled.
The publication includes:
-Selected stills from the film
-Worldbuilding materials
-Research and concept notes
-Production process documentation
-Visual studies and design references
-Texts on gendered AI, surveillance, memory, and East Asian futurism
Softcover
Perfect bound
5.5” × 8.5”
108 pages
