Luv, Lt. Joshi, Stelline and Freysa are all strong female characters so I don’t entirely agree that the criticism is valid. Certainly the universe in that movie exploited the female form, as does ours.
I saw the development of Joi interesting, as she started off as a generic sexist toy, a statement about how alone K was that even his home life was an illusion. But she grew beyond that. And it explored the question of whether she was truly becoming a person or was just saying what her algorithm thought K wanted to hear. Even Joi calling him “Joe” was brought into question when the advertisement called him “a good Joe”. That was an element that was classic Philip K. Dick, questioning what makes us alive, human. If a replicant is alive, what about an app like Joi?
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I can’t speak for this device; but I’ve seen a couple of designs with a screen inside a cylinder that(while by no means ‘holographic’) had the cylinder to protect moving parts.
The fake-hologram case has the screen(or a semitransparent plastic sheet being projected on, so you don’t have to run a high speed video bus through some mechanical arrangement that allows rotation) rotating in the cylinder, with persistence of vision filling in all the positions it isn’t occupying at any given moment which adds up to something that looks like it has volume. Doesn’t create fantastic image quality and the ‘hologram’ has to be semitransparent; but that’s what they tend to look like in the movies anyway.
The other one I ran into in an airport some time back; advertising/signage. Consisted of a big transparent cylinder with a rotating element inside that had one or more vertical strips of RGB LEDs pointing out and close to the walls of the cylinder: again, persistence of vision filled in the parts of the image not actually being painted by the LED strip(there may have been more than one, PoV assumptions were conservative enough that I couldn’t count the discontinuities) at a given moment. The overall effect was of a big, cylindrical, not terribly high-res display; without the cost of using some flexible substrate OLED or the like; which would probably be steep even now and would have been somewhere between ‘brutal’ and ‘simply not for sale yet’ back when this one was built.
The effect of a ‘screen’ that vibrates just slightly and makes a rather aggressive whirring noise audible when nearby because it has a substantial moving part rotating away inside is a bit disconcerting; however. You expect either dead silence, coil whine from backlight drivers, or assorted static electricity and magnetics sounds of a CRT from a display; not the sound of a not-quite-perfectly-balanced big rotary moving part; but that’s what this display had(along with a surface quite noticeably warm to the touch; I assume air resistance adds up in a mostly sealed tube).
Apart from joshi the other female characters seemed to be at the beck and call of male characters with not that much agency of their own. I’ve accepted what they did with joi but she still lives in a male character’s pocket for heaven’s sake and gets switched on or off as and when needed. Those are the criticisms and I recognise them, not to mention the world as a whole very much caters to the male gaze with massive holograms showing off digital asses.
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Luv was very asexual, almost a callback to Rachel in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? with her dampened emotions, expressing a sort of disdain for everyone except Wallace.
Dr. Anna Stelline was also female only because the child’s gender was important, not the sexuality. I saw no sexual tension or gendered discrimination in any of her scenes.
Joi is really the only one important to this topic, the logical extension of the “digital wife”. And even her arc has her leading us to question if she has a soul, or is just an application designed to respond in ways the owner requests. It’s sexist for a point.
Can she be trained to say “Help me, Sludge! You’re my only hope.”
?
Asking for a friend.
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