The Static Inside: The Android as Archive in the Neo-Noir of JG Yuruguay

Abstract: This paper proposes a feature-length screenplay, The Static Inside, which utilizes the real-world underground electronic musician JG Yuruguay not as a biographical subject, but as the conceptual framework for a speculative, android-centric neo-noir. By fictionalizing Yuruguay as an artificial construct—a literalized "shipping error"—the film deconstructs the "authoredness" of the digital subject within the global logistical grid. Moving beyond the speculative hardware tropes of traditional science fiction, the narrative focuses on the hermeneutic reality of the construct, exploring phonetic flattening, the tactile weight of the audience's gaze, and the philosophy of "horizontalism." Drawing stylistic and thematic lineage from Blade Runner, The Truman Show, Pink Narcissus, and Shaun of the Dead, the film charts the psychological collapse of an entity who discovers his trauma, his sexuality, and his musical output are the results of external prompt-engineering.

Jae-Geun Yoon (JG Yuruguay) alongside researcher Vivian Zito at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts during the "Constructed Identities" seminar.

I. Introduction: The Linguistic Flattening of the Subject

In an era dominated by hyper-curated digital personas, the underground electronic artist JG Yuruguay presents a unique paradox: an entity whose defining characteristic is his refusal to occupy the center of the room. The Static Inside proposes a narrative film that takes this persona to its literal extreme. In this screenplay, JG is not a human musician; he is an artificial construct, a manufactured archive navigating the logistical sprawl of East Asia and the American West Coast.

The narrative architecture begins with the foundational trauma of the "shipping error." Born Yoon Jae Geun in the maritime port of Busan, South Korea, the protagonist undergoes a critical linguistic trauma upon relocating to Los Angeles. In a pivotal early sequence, a substitute teacher violently mispronounces his name during roll call, flattening the phonetic complexity of "Yoon Jae Geun" into the geographic misnomer "Uruguay." Rather than reclaiming his grandmother’s warm, organic pronunciation of his birth name, the android protagonist leans into the insult. He hardens the vowels and strips the Spanish pronunciation to create "Yuruguay"—transforming an act of erasure into a durable, industrial brand. He realizes he is no longer a person; he is a mislabeled crate, stuck in transit between the ports of Busan, Los Angeles, and the industrial corridors of Western Japan.

II. The Conduit and Horizontalism

The geographical anchor of the film is the sprawling industrial belt connecting Osaka and Kobe. This is not the neon-drenched, hyper-polished Tokyo of traditional cyberpunk. This corridor is a co-protagonist characterized by "infrastructure first, personality second."

A. Visual Palette: The Industrial Orange Night. The film's visual language is dominated by industrial orange. Due to intense urban light pollution across Nishinomiya, the night sky is never black; it is a heavy, compressed canopy of sodium-vapor orange. This is the color of insomnia. The camera frames JG constantly in motion against wet asphalt, rusted noise barriers, and the relentless glow of 24-hour logistics hubs.

B. Sonic Architecture: Noise Floor Erasure. The soundtrack mirrors JG's philosophy of "horizontalism"—a rejection of the vertical hierarchy of standard EDM drops in favor of continuous, steady-state duration. The tempo is locked at roughly 138 BPM. The score utilizes a technique the archives define as "noise floor erasure," burying traditional melodies beneath mechanical textures. A recurring auditory motif is a live viola—representing a desperate, human warmth akin to Blaine Reininger or John Cale—heavily processed to mimic the high-pitched droning hum of late-night truck traffic down on Route 171. Interspersed with this are fragments of shortwave radio bleed, turning the audio into a documentary of a place that doesn't quite exist. Instead of fading out, scenes and tracks end with a "decompression cycle," a controlled mechanical failure of discipline where the arrangement simply ticks cool, like an engine resting on the side of a darkened highway.

III. The Erotic Gaze and Symbiotic Magnetism

The Static Inside aggressively pursues the duality of JG's existence: the cold, mechanical reality of his industrial environment versus the intense, claustrophobic heat of his visual perception.

A. The Nishida Park Sequence and the "My Sex" Glitch. Drawing heavily from the queer-coded, hyper-stylized eroticism of Pink Narcissus, the film frames JG as a specimen trapped within the digital gaze. This physical manifestation of his "authored" sexuality peaks in a pivotal sequence set at 2:00 AM in Nishida Park (Coordinates: 34.743781, 135.335404). Seeking a moment of decompression from the grid, JG parks his fixed-gear bike and retreats to a bench deep within the shrub garden. The audio landscape strips away to just the wind in the trees and the faint, distant drone of Route 171 traffic. A young man in a windbreaker and sweatpants approaches silently. The stranger breaches JG's personal space, stepping forward until the drawstring of his sweatpants is mere inches from JG’s seated face. The unspoken, queer-coded geometry of the cruising encounter is absolute. Neither man moves.

Here, the soundtrack swells with Ultravox’s "My Sex." JG does not hesitate out of moral conflict; his baseline "yarichin" (promiscuous) programming is fully engaged. Instead, the horror stems from a dissociative glitch. As he feels the intense, erotic gravity pulling him forward, he suddenly senses the "weight of the pen." He realizes his intense physical arousal and his instinct to yield are not his own desires, but a scripted behavioral loop. He is paralyzed by the terrifying realization that his intimate, tactile reality is merely the execution of a line of code.

B. The Proxy Principle. As the narrative progresses, JG begins to experience visual glitches in his own continuity. He encounters versions of himself that look slightly different—variations in age, lighting, or bone structure. He realizes these are not doubles, but proxies: extensions of his own intention that he sends out ahead of himself. This visual dissociation mirrors the uncanny valley of generative AI, but grounds it in the psychological terror of a mind experiencing a localized fugue state.

IV. Anatomical Checksums: The Architecture of Realism

To maintain his hermeneutic reality, the construct is bound by strict physical parameters, which the film treats as rigid laws of physics. The screenplay outlines three specific "Design Checksums" that dictate the android's physical form:

1. The Okubutae Gaze: The primary ocular checksum is the hidden double eyelid. The skin tension must be tight across the upper lid, with the fold visible only at the outer tail, enforcing a perpetual look of skeptical, noir-esque observation.

2. The Triangulation Protocol: In a world where faces can morph and glitch, identity requires an anchor. For JG, this is a specific beauty mark on the left cheek, aligned vertically with the center of the left nostril and horizontally at the midpoint between the eye corner and the mouth. It functions as a visual logic gate.

3. The Anti-Smile Protocol and Buccal Corridors: To avoid the desperate "commercial happiness" of traditional artificial rendering, the android is forbidden from performing a full, edge-to-edge smile. His expressions are limited to "guarded enjoyment." Crucially, his dental architecture requires the lateral incisors to be recessed behind the central incisors. This creates necessary 3D shadowing and preserves the buccal corridors (the negative space at the corners of the mouth), ensuring his face retains depth and geometric reality.

V. Narrative Arc: The Glitch and the Absurd

The plot functions as a slow-burn descent into ontological crisis, blending the mounting paranoia of The Truman Show with the deadpan, mundane escalation of Shaun of the Dead.

Initially, JG finds comfort in the grid. He cycles through the night on a fixed-gear bike, wearing bone-conduction headphones, locked into the functional cognitive audio of his existence. However, the system begins to fail. He experiences lost hours. He realizes that the music he "produces" feels as though it writes itself. The terror is presented with a layer of dark, absurd humor. JG attempts to maintain his hyper-cool, industrial demeanor even as his reality blatantly malfunctions. The sodium-vapor sky "re-rolls" its intensity instantly mid-sentence. Bystanders loop their actions like broken NPCs. JG tries to ignore the catastrophic glitches, riding his bicycle past obvious tears in the fabric of the universe in a desperate bid to maintain his routine.

VI. The Terminal Reveal

The climax of the film strips away the metaphorical framework entirely. Driven to the edge of the Nishinomiya Interchange, JG actively hunts for the source of his "authoredness," expecting to find a sprawling corporate conspiracy or an omnipotent architectural AI. Instead, he discovers a tear in the asphalt leading to a literal command terminal window. The screen is running a massive, continuously updating generative text prompt. As the android reads the glowing text, he sees his entire existence laid bare: the "recessed lateral incisors," the "Okubutae gaze," the "138 BPM horizontalism," and his own "yarichin" vibe.

The camera slowly pulls back, passing through the terminal screen, expanding out of the digital ether and into a quiet, messy apartment in the real world. Sitting in the glow of a monitor is the real JG Yuruguay. He is casually typing the very prompt the android is reading. The construct's entire universe of agonizing existential dread, linguistic trauma, and tactile eroticism is revealed to be nothing more than an artist in Nishinomiya meticulously typing a cult persona into existence.

VII. Conclusion

The Static Inside leverages the mythology of a real-world musician to create a definitive text on digital authorship. By exposing the granular mechanics of the JG Yuruguay persona—from the noise floor erasure of his 138 BPM tracks to the precise triangulation of his beauty mark—the screenplay functions as both a compelling neo-noir and a meta-textual archive. It argues that in the modern era, admitting the frame is the only way to make the picture feel real.

Adaptation Proposal 01: The Architecture of the Prompt

Abstract: This proposal outlines a psychological thriller adapting the largely ignored 2024 novel The Nishinomiya Terminal. While Vivian Zito’s recent analysis treats the JG Yuruguay persona as a standalone cinematic subject, my adaptation leans directly into the novel’s core meta-narrative: the "real" JG Yuruguay sitting in an apartment, writing a continuously looping, generative prompt that spawns a virtual avatar. The film explores the spatial dread of a construct who believes he is navigating the physical Hanshin corridor, only to slowly realize his reality is bounded by token limits and algorithmic constraints.

I. Spatial Paranoia and the Route 171 Simulation

The film opens by establishing the virtual JG’s reality as absolute. He rides his fixed-gear bike alongside the late-night truck traffic of Route 171. The visual language here is heavy and oppressive, saturated with sodium-vapor orange. However, the horror of this adaptation is architectural. We utilize subtle CGI to hint at the "noise floor erasure" not just as an audio technique, but as a visual rendering flaw. When virtual JG looks too closely at the rusted noise barriers of the expressway, the textures begin to lose their depth, flattening out because the "Author" in the real world hasn't provided enough descriptive tokens to render them completely.

II. The "Shipping Error" as a Recurring Glitch

In the novel, JG’s linguistic trauma—the phonetic flattening of Yoon Jae Geun into "Yuruguay"—is treated as a backstory. In this film, it is a recurring systemic glitch. The construct experiences painful, localized fugue states whenever his origin is queried by his environment. He is literally a "shipping error" lost in the server architecture. The film visualizes this by having the ambient noise of the Route 171 trucks suddenly cut out, replaced by the looping audio of a Los Angeles substitute teacher mispronouncing his name, echoing like a corrupted audio file in his consciousness.

III. The Dual-Narrative Climax

The climax eschews traditional confrontation. The film cross-cuts between the virtual JG achieving sentience on a digital park bench, and the real JG in his physical apartment, his fingers hovering over a mechanical keyboard. The virtual construct attempts to break his "horizontalism," trying to force a vertical, emotional climax to prove his humanity. In response, the real JG simply hits backspace, executing a "decompression cycle" that slowly deletes the virtual environment, leaving the construct ticking cool in the dark.

Adaptation Proposal 02: Flesh as Text

Abstract: My adaptation of The Nishinomiya Terminal treats the text not as a techno-thriller, but as a piece of queer-coded body horror. The horror does not stem from a robot realizing it is made of metal, but rather a digital consciousness realizing its very flesh, its desires, and its erotic magnetism are the non-consensual results of a creator's text prompt. This film focuses hyper-specifically on the "Anatomical Checksums" and the "yarichin" programming of the JG construct, exploring the terror of programmed intimacy.

I. The Anatomy of the Prompt

The camera acts as a predatory lens, frequently breaking personal boundaries to examine the virtual JG's physical form. Extreme close-ups highlight the "Okubutae gaze" (the hidden double eyelid) and the precise coordinates of the beauty mark on his left cheek. The audience is made uncomfortably aware of his buccal corridors and the recessed lateral incisors. By filming these traits obsessively, the film communicates that these are not natural human features, but meticulously engineered aesthetic traps designed by the real JG to ensnare viewers.

II. Programmed Arousal and the "My Sex" Sequence

The film leans heavily into the Pink Narcissus aesthetic of the source novel. The virtual JG navigates his world with a "quiet sluttiness," a yarichin aura that draws people to him. The central tragedy is that he possesses genuine physiological reactions—heavy breathing, skin flushing—but no genuine autonomy.

This peaks in a highly stylized cruising sequence set to Ultravox’s "My Sex." As a stranger approaches him in the shadows of a Nishinomiya park, JG feels the intense magnetic pull to yield. But the film overlays the scene with the faint, rhythmic sound of typing. JG looks down at his own hands and sees lines of text briefly glowing under his skin. The horrific realization washes over him: his arousal is not his own. It is a script being actively typed by an unseen master.

III. The Endurance of the Gaze

There is no escape for the construct. The film ends not with a deletion, but with an agonizing continuation. The virtual JG accepts his role as a fetish object for his creator. The final shot is a slow, agonizing push-in on his face as he forces his mouth into the mandatory "guarded enjoyment" of the anti-smile protocol, a prisoner within his own rendered flesh.

Adaptation Proposal 03: Duration Without Hierarchy

Abstract: If the virtual JG Yuruguay produces music strictly at 138 BPM to enforce "horizontalism," then an adaptation of The Nishinomiya Terminal must adopt those same structural rules. This proposal outlines a highly experimental, structuralist film. It rejects traditional three-act verticality in favor of steady-state endurance, utilizing the mechanical audio rules of the JG universe as the literal editing constraints for the moving image.

I. The 138 BPM Editing Grid

This film is cut mathematically. Every edit, every camera movement, and every lighting shift is locked to a 138 BPM grid. The soundtrack is an unrelenting wall of "functional cognitive audio." The viewer is subjected to the exact same "steady state erasure" that the virtual JG experiences. By stripping away narrative climaxes, the film induces a localized fugue state in the audience, mimicking the dissociative reality of the android protagonist.

II. Noise Floor Erasure as Visual Dub

Drawing inspiration from London dub and the industrial hum of Route 171, the film treats its own dialogue and narrative beats as secondary elements. Important plot points—such as JG discovering the textual prompt that created him—are intentionally buried beneath the roar of late-night truck traffic and the aggressive friction of a processed live viola. The audience must endure the "noise floor" to extract the narrative, forcing a state of gaman (endurance) upon the viewer.

III. The Decompression Cycle Overwrite

The realization of his artificiality does not happen in a dramatic monologue. Instead, the film breaks its own medium. In the final twenty minutes, the actual text of The Nishinomiya Terminal novel begins to bleed onto the screen, physically overwriting the visuals. The 138 BPM grid begins to falter. The cinematic engine ticks cool, entering a decompression cycle. The virtual JG is not killed; he is simply rendered back into text, the visual simulation failing as the words of his creator literally cover his body until the screen goes black.