In an essay by William Timberman titled “The Future of Our Discontents“, he comments on the visual use of smoke in Blade Runner:

“almost everyone in Blade Runner smokes — the impenetrable tobacco haze is an important visual element in many of the interior scenes. It isn’t clear, in an age when smoking has become anathema, an almost universal symbol of dissipation and self-contempt, what Scott intends by giving it such pride of place in his version of the twenty-first century.

The answer, I think, is that the smoking in Blade Runner is intended as an echo, a reminder that all the poisonous exhalations of a capitalist society are voluntary. The fatal eroticism embodied in the fumes from Rachael’s smoldering cigarette is repeated in the orange skies above Los Angeles, in the continual dark rain which beats along its decaying rooftops and licks at the trash fires in its streets. Consumption pursued as an end in itself, Scott seems to be saying, will lead to the same, slow catastrophe whether it is an individual or an entire society which does the pursuing.”

In a book by David Pinder called Visions of the City:Utopianism, Power. and Politics , something he said about the role of utopianism in the imagination and perception of the city seemed related to the project of Sci-Fi futurism/urbanism in the stories we’ve looked at so-far.

For Pinder, to envision a utopia in an urban/spatial form works to disrupt the “seemingly inevitable reproduction of the present”. Envisioning is about “developing projects, events, situations and struggles through which other possibilities become more tangible and what is revealed as truly absurd is the claim, not that there are alternatives to be won, but that there aren’t any. Isn’t that the really shocking proposal, that this is it?”.

I thought it was interesting how the role of smoking in the L.A. of 2019 also creates this sense of possibility and choice in the movie’s depiction of what may come out of the actual reproduction of present trends. (Trends such as hyper-globalization with no clear direction, coupled with the persistence of uncertainty so inherent in the human experience).

What started out as a search for the Tagalog in Star Wars turned into a bizarre backward-and-forwarding of Google searches about something we touched on the other day: the presence of “Asian-ness” and Orientalism in science fiction. Some intriguing things I found (which Hung Te might know more about, having expressed interest in class?):

\”0/1 v. Zion: Techno-Orientalism in \’The Matrix\’\” — An essay presented at the Visualizing the City  Symposium at the University of Manchester in 2005. A choice quote that has to do with the films we just happened to have watched:

Hegel famously wrote in The Philosophy of History, “The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning” (103-04). U.S. and European science-fiction filmmakers, clearly not Hegelians, have assumed the opposite to be the case: to them, the future is Asian.
Lisa Nakamura, borrowing the term from Greta Niu, calls this “techno-orientalism”: sci-fi films and fictions, writes Nakamura, use “images of Japanese geishas, ninjas, and samurai warriors” to “establish the distinctive look and feel of a cyberpunk future,” resulting in “a high-tech variety of racial stereotyping” (Nakamura 63). Nakamura locates the beginnings of cinematic techno-orientalism in Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner, but Western filmmakers began using Asian cultural tropes to signify the (often-dystopic, always-radically-Other) future of humankind at least as early as the 1920s, when the first of the Fu Manchu pictures was released, and Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis opened, introducing the Robot Maria, as David Desser says, “in a nightclub of ‘Oriental splendour’, the Yoshiwara (the name of the traditional pleasure quarter of Japan’s Edo, now Tokyo)” (Desser 82-83).

Writer gailderecho’s assertion in the beginning about science-fiction filmmakers exoticizing the future represents a shift in Orientalism: 

Techno-Orientalism: Shattering the Mirror of Itself — Maya Kovskaya explains:

As media critics Morley and Robins have noted, with the rise of Information Capitalism and Japan’s technological ascendancy, the functioning of Orientalism as a sign was altered by its combination with technology. Through the inversion of meanings attendant to Techno-Orientalism, Japan, and now the rapidly developing Greater Asia, has become a sign of the (technologically advanced?) future, rather than the (backward?) past, presaging a shift in power relations and alignment of new global communities. Toshiya Ueno argues that Techno-Orientalism functions as a “a semi-transparent or two-way mirror,” through which ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ apprehend each other, forming invidious images of an Other against which a self is constituted.

And (I don’t remember quite how this happened) I was inexplicably led back to the beginning of everything – our class discussion on Blade Runner:

The Future of L.A.?

Los Angeles 2019

Los Angeles 2009

Johnny – any thoughts?

This film poster reminded me of the “raygun gothic” / Googie architecture that we briefly looked at yesterday; it’s playing Thursday night at Vancity Theatre as part of Spark FX ’09 (http://www.vifc.org/films/special.htm). I can’t explain it, but I find something in the 1950s aesthetic very appealing, probably the use of color.

Also, because nothing beats a retro trailer that basically tells you the entire plot:

“What’s a bathing suit?”

“Oh, murder!”

{Edit}

Just thought I should add a little something about retro-futurism (from the wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retro-futurism):

“Retrofuturistic design is a return to, and an enthusiasm for, the depictions of the future produced in the past (most often the 1920s through 1960s), both in science fiction and in nonfiction futurism of the time, which often seem dated by modern standards.^[1] The ideology combines retrogradesociopolitical views with techno-utopianism. […] A great deal of attention is drawn to fantastic machines, buildings, cities, and transportation systems. The futuristic design ethic of the early 20th century tends to solid colors, streamlined shapes, and mammoth scales. It might be said that 20th century futuristic vision found its ultimate expression in the development of googie or populuxe design. As applied to fiction, this brand of retro-futuristic visual style is also referred to as Raygun Gothic, a catchall term for a visual style that incorporates various aspects of the Googie, Streamline Moderneand Art Deco architectural styles when applied to retro-futuristic science fiction environments.”

What interests me about this is how even the “future” can seem dated when viewed through the lens of cultures past, as we were talking about in regards to Bladerunner… forward thinking directors and designers try to keep this in mind. Thankfully, most don’t, and we can have a laugh at representations of a future that we are supposedly living in right now; I once read a hilarious article about the things that we need to invent right away to be up to speed with the 2015 as envisioned in Back to the Future Part 2. Guess what guys, there are only 6 years left before we all have hoverboards!

Hi everyone – just a reminder: Michael Filimowicz will be guest-lecturing Wednesday’s seminar. Currently teaching at the SFU SIAT, he is developing a public-art project for the city of Surrey, and has exhibited a range of creative film and photographic projects, in addition to publishing short stories in science-fiction. He specializes in sound design.

A brief partial-summary of last wednesdays seminar:

we opened with a short, non-committal discussion around Hatherley’s article, which I thought I’d summarize and intersperse with points from our discussion:

– the essay introduces Taylor as an American Cybernetician , whose meathod of regulating and rationalizing  labour was pivotal in what Lenin saw as a means of “preparing the grounds for a system that will supersede capitalism” – as Hatherly puts it: “we could read Lenin’s Taylorism as a liberating theoretical leap. A harnessing of mechanisation and efficency, of mathematical infallibility, to a radically democratic Communist society”

He frames Zamyatin’s novel in this context, departing from the idea of We as simply a cautionary tale, a critical attack on the ideologies it appears to satirize. Instead Hatherly looks at the book as more oblique, ambiguous and complex.

– within the satirical exaltations of Taylorism is “a sincere wonder at the possibilities of the machine” manifest within Zamyatin’s aesthetic: we noted that, barring the Integral and the executional “Machine”, there is an apparent lack of technology within the book. Instead, the form imposed on the narrative (discussed previously) functions as a kind of embodiment of the technology that in part inspires its fascination  – affording a perspectival shift in the blurred, fragmentary relaying of thought and imagery; the increased velocity of a “technological” epoch – the book reads like a landscape as seen from an automobile, an airplane. 

(on the tangent of aesthetics, El Lissitzky and his (children’s?) book About Two Squares was mentioned briefly, as employing form in its minimal, elemental construction, as a means of communication and propaganda – how does the form of Lissitzky’s art – and of constructivist art in general – relate to that of Zamyatin’s writing?)

– Hatherly answers this question directly: “We is on one level an extrapolation and expansion of Constructivism, the utopian art movement of the period, which aimed at a transformation of everyday life at its smallest levels, harnessing art to production.”  

– at the time in which We was written, it is noted that – ravaged by civil war and dissolved through mass migration – both economically and technologically the Soviet Union was crippled: “At this point in the Soviet Union there were barely factories at all, let alone the Taylorised glass constructions dreamt of by Lenin, Rodchenko or Zamyatin. Taylorism had the power of the purest of fantasies.”

Hatherly concludes by distilling a broken optimism from the book, acknowledging the kinds of potentials within the rationalist construction that is both denounced and ratified through Zamyatin’s book:

” Contained within the novel and in the Constructivism it satirises is a promise of a transformation of everyday life via technology that is in part based on the possibilities of fantasy…there is something bracing about these austere, rationalist constructions in their collectivity and idealism, a broken promise still riven with poignancy.”

– moving away from the essay, the topic of propaganda came up in relation to the function of the Integral. The ship, while destined for other, off-planet civilizations, is more a propagandistic tool for OneState itself – providing a public work that encapsulates a collective voice of self-aggrandizement repeated through its continued construction.

m83’s album ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us’ is soaked in Vangelis’ aesthetic.

Here’s something about another of m83’s albums:

“I thought immediately of two different things when listening to Digital Shades, Vol. 1. The first is Vangelis’ soundtrack for Blade Runner. There is something in M83’s songs that was also inherent in Vangelis’, that being the theme of a machine striving to be human.”

Here’s a great song by them:

M83 – Teen Angst

Blade Runner has also had quite a lot of influence on the fashion industry.

“You’ll Rent BladeRunner for Wardrobe Guidance.

Dolce & Gabbana looked to Judy Jetson for inspiration, while Balenciaga’s vibe was more Tron. Comme des Garçons played both sides (a plastic trench over a relatively old-fashioned suit), while Brit favorite Gareth Pugh’s fembots were dressed for Area 51. The future has arrived: Here’s what to wear.”

A couple of links:

Junko Shimada’s Bladerunner inspired Fall/Winter 08

A gallery of Bladerunner’s fashion

Post-Humanism and Ecocide in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

This picture is from Burning Man a couple of summers ago, which was themed “Future: Hope or Fear?” People could vote one way or the other at stations around the camp, and this pavilion reflected the scores. It might be too small to see, but the clock thingy at the center says that fear was winning! Yay! Also, the “man” would change depending on the score: arms down= fear is winning, arms up= hope is winning.

The pavilion is designed to reflect the theme, so it changes every year. Interestingly, this “future” pavilion seems to match Metropolis‘s 1920s art-deco-ish vibe. I thought it was pretty cool, but… it burned down. Oh well!

Bonus fun activity: see how many crazy hats you can spot