humans and machines
“Blade Runner”
Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar, HUM 102, Spring
questions...
• What constitutes human?
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What does it mean to be human?
What are the boundaries between
humans and machines, humans and
nonhumans, living and nonliving,
inorganic and organic?
Can these boundaries collapse or
become unclear? If so, what happens as
a result of the blurring of the boundaries
between humans and machines?
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Frankenstein myth:
a tale of “perverted”
science?
Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein: often
interpreted as a popular
symbol of concerns over the
risks and dangers of science
and technology (the dangers
of “messing with nature” or
“playing God”)
Is the “monstrous” creature
an image of our failure to
control science and
technology?
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is the creature made
monstrous...
by his unnaturalness? (body
parts taken from several corpses,
stitched together to form a
different being; artificially-created
life by a man)
because Dr. Frankenstein
transgresses natural or Godgiven boundaries?
because Dr. Frankenstein
abandons the creature,
unprepared, to a hostile world,
taking no responsibility for his
work?
METROPOLIS (1927) by
Fritz
Lang
• silent science fiction film
set in the year 2000 in a
futuristic city
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depicts a society given
over to the powers of
science and technology
and ruled in a coldly
rational manner
very important for its
striking visual images of
modern anxiety over
technology and
urbanization
Robotic Maria
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Lang’s image of a robotic
Maria embodies a duality of
technology’s attractions and
subversions
I- Robotic Maria’s seductive
power played out in its
dance before the city’s elite,
and the ease with which
she lures the workers into
rebellion
II- A force of destruction
and potential human
replacement
Blade Runner (1982)
• dystopian science
fiction film directed by
Ridley Scott
• loosely based on the
novel Do Androids
Dream of Electric
Sheep? by Philip K.
Dick
• set in Los Angeles in
November 2019
Blade
• combines
genresRunner...
of science fiction and
film noir
• cyberpunk: associated with the dark
visions of the near future on earth, where
humans are under the influence of
various technologies (electronic,
informational, genetic), making it virtually
impossible to distinguish between the
real and the artificially replicated
• For the cyberpunks, technology is
visceral, pervasive and utterly intimate.
Not outside us, but next to us. Under our
skin; often, inside our minds.
Blade Runner...
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Rick Deckard is a former
member of a special police
force called “blade runner”
replicants: genetically
engineered organic robots
exclusively used for
dangerous, menial or leisure
work on off-world colonies;
their use on Earth is banned;
they are “retired” (executed) by
blade runners if they are seen
on Earth
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film noir
generally focuses on urban
crime and corruption
a dystopic city; a mystery; a
detective figure; and a
bleak-fatalistic tone
low-key lighting;
claustrophobic framing;
shadows/reflections;
unbalanced compositions
uncertainty as a central
theme
mostly about violations:
vice, corruption,
dark film
Blade Runner’s 2019
Los Angeles (City of
Angels)
no nature visually and acoustically intrusive
wealthy people have left for off-world
colonies
Alienating and
degrading
The city is a gloomy, rainy,
commercially driven,
multiethnic megapolis
disembodied eye
universalizing, godlike perspective?
eye imagery
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The bursting flames seem to suggest a world of
terror and violence
The potential for volcanic eruption (outburst of
violence) seems to lie just beneath the surface of
this city
A metaphor the for a dilemma of human definition
and identification
uncertainty of vision
• In Blade Runner, the more we see, the
more our uncertainty grows.
• Its world features a profusion of
simulations: synthetic animals, giant
view screens, replicants, memory
implants and faked photos...
replicants: monsters or
“more human than
humans”?
Leon
Rachel
Roy
Pris
Zhora
replicants
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Entirely biological
creatures, designed by
genetic engineers to
be “off-world” slaves
on space colonies.
They are designed to
copy human beings in
every way except for
their emotions.
They have a four-year
life-span.
replicants...
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denied autonomy and the chance to fulfill
their desires
kept working as slaves
not allowed to return to earth—under penalty
of death
cannot be assimilated into the old codes of
human definition (expansion of the definition
of the human?)
The Voight Kampff Test
The test establishes a surveillance method that makes it
possible to qualify, classify, and punish.
The Voight Kampff Test
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determines the presence or absence of the subject's
humanity by examining the fluctuation of its retina when
certain emotions are provoked
the replicant’s eye is assumed to be incapable of
registering empathy and therefore incapable of
representing human
other feelings? (i.e. alienation and fear)
does the screened eye signify the human?
implanted memories
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Replicants are programmed with memories to make
them indistinguishable from humans.
Photographs: visual images of these artificial
memories; fundamentally connected to what they
depict.
The tangibility of the photograph creates a substitute
history.
Creator-Creation
• Both Frankenstein and Blade Runner
explore the emotional dynamics
between a creator and his creation
• Roy Batty, confronts his Maker in hopes
of receiving from him the gift of an
increased life-span
• Limits of human knowledge?
A Cyborg Manifesto
• Donna Haraway, describes differentiating
between human and machine as a “leaky
distinction,” since “late twentieth century
machines have made thoroughly ambiguous
the difference between natural and artificial,
mind and body, self-developing and
externally designed, and many other
distinctions that used to apply to organisms
and machines. Our machines are disturbingly
lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”
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"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century," 1991.