Review
CONCEIVING ADA
Rating: 
USA/Germany. 1997.
Director/Virtual Set Production Design – Lynn Hershman Leeson, Screenplay – Lynn Hershman Leeson & Eileen Jones, Producers – Lynn Hershman Leeson & Henry S. Rosenthal, Photography – Hiro Narita, Photography (Virtual Sets) – Bill Zarchy, Music – The Residents, Digital Visual Effects – digital phenomena inc (Supervisor– Jamie Clay), Godsdog Animation – XAOS Inc, Mechanical Bird Design – Laurel Roth. Production Company – ZDF-Arte/Hotwire Productions/Complex Corporation.
Cast:
Tilda Swinton (Ada Byron King), Francesca Faridany (Emmy Coer), John O’Keefe (Charles Babbage), John Perry Barlowe (John Crosse), Timothy Leary (Sims), Karen Black (Lady Byron/Mother Coer)
Plot: In 1993 computer researcher Emmy Coer perfects a search program that can gather the remnants of past events. She is fascinated with Ada Byron King, the daughter of Lord Byron, who in the 1850s devised plans for the world’s first working computer, although never built it. At first Emmy merely uses the program to watch Ada’s struggles. But then she builds Ada a virtual body so that she can communicate with her.
Conceiving Ada is an indie release that is based on the life of Ada Byron (1815-52), the real-life daughter of writer/poet Lord Byron who constructed plans for a primitive analog computer with Charles Babbage (who took most of the credit for it). Director/co-writer/co-producer Lynn Hershman Leeson is a photographer/filmmaker who has devoted a number of other works to the questions of feminism and cybernetic identity. It is clear upon Leeson’s part that she has set out to make a film with a feminist mission, of giving some time to this seldom recognized figure from the very dawn of the Computer Age.
Alas, despite Leeson’s earnest intentions, Conceiving Ada is a hopelessly pretentious mess. First of all the film really should’ve been a straight biopic of Ada Byron – something that would have been an interesting idea. Leeson has created a framing device for the biographical drama about a computer science researcher in the present creating a virtual body for Ada, whereby she watches the details of Ada’s life and Ada eventually comes to talk to her. It’s a loopy idea that smacks more of New Age mysticism than it does of computer science. In creating a ‘program’ that goes and searches through time and space and gathers ‘information’, Leeson makes no difference between information in the sense of events that happened in the past and information as in the binary storage of data in a computer. And Leeson takes such nonsense far too seriously – one thinks that if you are going to make a film about the creator of the computer then you could at least do it justice by knowing something about computers.
Although one also tends to think that it wouldn’t have made a very interesting biopic anyway. The film is made on a B budget and Leeson mistakes the description of dull biographical detail for making a subject’s life dramatically interesting. The film also features an appearance from a 76 year old Timothy Leary – in fact Leary died before the film was even released. Leary is sadly aged, moreover he’s a non-actor and seems to be rambling without much idea of what he is meant to be saying.
Leeson returned to sf with her next film Teknolust (2002), also starring Tilda Swinton as a scientist who creates several clones of herself. Last updated: Friday, 19 September 2008
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