POSTHUMAN EXISTENCE IN ARTIFICIAL WORLDS: SPACE, TECHNOLOGY, AND IDENTITY IN PASSENGERS

Abstract

The spacecraft Avalon in Passengers (2016) is examined in this paper as a technologically mediated setting that creates posthuman subjectivity by fusing corporate infrastructures, automated systems, and artificial intelligence with human life. Based on N. Katherine Hayles' posthumanist theory, the study contends that rather than autonomous individual action, the movie depicts human identity as being formed through informational processes, technological mediation, and distributed cognition. Through algorithmic governance, automated service networks, and hibernation technologies, the Avalon functions as an enclosed artificial environment where human bodies are converted into data-regulated entities, obfuscating the distinction between humans and machines.The study illustrates how subjectivity arises within a system of technical regulation that reconfigures embodiment and agency by examining the ship's architecture, service infrastructures, corporate control over time, biological processes, and social interaction. Stratified forms of posthuman existence are created by automated surroundings and hierarchical spatial architecture, where corporate control and computational authority influence identity. Thus, the Avalon is shown in the movie as a posthuman lifeworld where survival, embodiment, and consciousness are all created by technology.In the final stages, Passengers shows how closed technical systems alter human experience by substituting digitally distributed forms of agency for liberal humanism ideas of autonomy. By highlighting the moral and political ramifications of technologically controlled living in late capitalism space imaginaries, the research presents the movie as a critical investigation of posthuman existence in artificial worlds.