OF WINDOWS AND MEMBRANESTop

According to the traditional historiography on the medium, Auguste and Louis Lumière’s L’Arrivée d’un Train à la Ciotat marked, in 1985, one of the first and most dramatic affirmations of the dramatic change in perception that cinema would install in modern culture. As Tom Gunning recounts, “spectators reared back in their seats, or screamed, or got up and ran from the auditorium (or all three in succession)” (Gunning, 1989: 114) during the first projection of the film at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris. Even if the veracity of the scene, as it frequently happens with other ‘myths of origin’[1] has been contested, it retains its value as an effective parable of the revolution that the new medium brought about. Decades earlier, photography had revolutionized the representation of reality, replacing it by its capture through technological means. Now cinema, by introducing time within the picture, substituted memory for the recording of the past. Photography had opened a window to frozen instants of the past, which could be beheld in its static perfection. Cinema opened a window to the past itself, preserved alive for the viewing pleasure of the spectator.

The Lumières also made sure that the awe caused by the insertion of movement was augmented by the very physical qualities of the exhibition. Unlike in Edison’s kinetoscopic projections, the scale in which the moving pictures were shown reinforced the illusion of the screen as a window to another time and place. Peeping from behind the textile membrane, in the darkness of the movie theatre, the spectator was turned by cinema into a voyeur, and soon, as Susan Sontag suggested, a flâneur de interieur[2]. As Gunning notes, films such as Edison’s The Railroad Smash-Up (1904), which showed two trains colliding, offered a taste of the thrill of attractions such as Stern’s Duplex Railway (also known as the Leap Frog Railway), in Coney Island, where “two electric cars... were set towards each other at great speed on a collision course. Just before impact one car was lifted up on curved rails and skimmed over the top of the other.[3]” Cinema set, in this sense, the first stone in the path that would ultimately lead to the full experience of fictional worlds with the advent of virtual reality.

Simulation and illusion being an integral part of cinema’s DNA, soon, recording reality led to the creation of new realities for the camera. Besides a technological achievement, cinema was also heir to the vaudevillesque culture of optical illusions and trick shows that had entertained the masses in the XIX century. Soon, the possibilities of the new medium offered were embraced by artists coming from the world of the magic theatre such as Robert W. Paul, Walter R. Booth, Edwin Porter, or, very especially, Georges Melies[4], who would take cinematographic depictions beyond the limits of the possible, confronting the audience with visions of fantastic worlds, or impossible situations, but always imbued with a vivid feeling of reality.

METROPOLIS AND DEMENTIAL LIFE. LIFE AND THE MENTAL CITYTop

Appearing at the very beginning of the 1930s, Just Imagine built on several decades of construction of the future, representing the epitome of the visions of vertical growth built on the American architectural icon par excellence, the skyscraper. The city presented by the film was, in this sense, a compilation and a distillation of the architectural dreams designed and illustrated by architects such as Harvey Willey Corbett, Hugh Ferriss (a draughtsman with an architecture degree), Raymond Hood, Francisco Mújica, and many others: a vertical city with stepped buildings, climbing spires and overlapping streets, but a universal order. Architects envisioned the future as a gigantic, über-New York built on an up scaled version of the Manhattan grid, a city that was massive in its built form, and complex in its circulatory system, but with the overall sense of order that only a city created ex novo could display. As such, it was presented in magnificent aerial shots, typical of the demiurgic position of the all-controlling architect. The city of the architects was a total design, with the coherence, but also with the limitations, of the designs produced by a single mind.

However, this was not the image that the media had been promoting since the last decades of the XIX century, and subsequently (albeit arguably), it did not correspond with the perception that the citizens of the turn of the century had of their present and, by extension, their future urban reality. As scholars such as Carol Willis and Joseph J. Corn have pointed out, in the first decades of the 20th century the image of the future was produced as much by architects as by cartoonists and journal illustrations[19]. Working for the media, these professionals used the future as a way to comment, criticize and satirize the present, creating the process hyperbolic portrayals of the city that showed an ability to capture contemporary urban experience through visions of an improbable, absurd, but visually arresting future. The illustrations produced by Albert Robed in France, but also those by Harry Grant Dart, Albert Levering, Richard Rummell, Louis Biedermann, or Harry M. Petit in the US, pictured a future of aerial traffic and overlapping pathways, towering blocks made of a patchwork of different styles, -mostly Art Decó and Beaux arts- and an overall cacophonic mixture of different activities, people, traffics and communication spaces. The city depicted by the media appeared, in this sense, as a most accurate portrayal of that ‘sensorially intensified space’, that oversaturation of stimuli that the citizen of the early XX century perceived developing around him, only recreated through hyperbole. However, even if Just Imagine did not fit within this lineage, there was an earlier film that shared this ability to render the present of proto-modernity through the delirious depiction of its future.

The film in question was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (UFA, 1927). Based on a script by his then wife, Thea von Harbou, it was in its surface, a fable on the relationships between the capital and the working class with a rather simplistic social message. The impact of the film was due, however, to its portrayal of the eponymous Metropolis, a city of the then distant year 2000. As Lang would later acknowledge, the origins of the film date back to his first visit of Manhattan in 1924, where he became fascinated with the modern city[20]. A man with a technical education, Lang was ‘very interested in the cities and the machines’[21], and Metropolis became the perfect vehicle to channel them, as Buñuel’s remark certified. However, as H.G. Wells angrily pointed out in his own review, there was nothing particularly novel or futuristic in Metropolis[22]. Its strengths lay elsewhere, namely in fulfilling the promises that the media had installed in the collective eye-mind of society. Metropolis showed the street finally turning into an infinitely vertical space designed to be travelled through at its different heights, a space that the viewer could be experience for the first time in all its photographic and cinematic glory. It also reproduced, via vast models, the experience of the cacophony of proto-modern urban space of printed media. With his usual dictatorial ways, Lang instructed his set designers, Erich Kettelhut, Karl Vollbrecht, and Otto Hunte to produce a cityscape that was a mishmash of different architectural elements and trends imported from past and present. From Art Decó, the recently defunct Art Nouveau, or the “Stahlende Romantik” advocated by Goebbels, to Mies Van der Rohe’s and the Glasserne Kette’s glass skyscrapers, or the austere volumes of the Chicago School, the street scene of Metropolis put an “accent on the disparate” that, as Jacobsen and Sudendorf put it, was what made “the overall architectonic design so amazingly valid[23]”.

Thus, the film echoed at once both the real city, as well as its many hyperbolic reflections, portraying not a preconceived design for the future, but rather an image of what could happen if an existing city kept growing vertically through time. It presented urban growth as a physical-historical collapse, where new structures are superimposed on the old, and new roads bridge over the existing ones, crossing diagonally, sloping up, as necessity dictates, not as part of a preconceived plan. It portrayed, in a certain way, not a future, rebuilt, amplified New York, but rather a European City that had grown organically towards its own far future (Figure 2.2). But even more fascinatingly, this collage mentality extended to the whole film, where the city was depicted in different, alternative, divergent, and often contradictory ways: as a compound of massive zigguratts in the opening, in an aerial shot showing the streets converging diagonally in the centre, through images of mega-blocks and constructivist towers tilting on each other... (Figure 3) If Vivian Sobchack argued that the city in Clifford Simak’s eponymous 1952 novel was ‘a hypnogogic place’, Metropolis was rather a mental space, a heterogeneous reality made of a compound of perceptions that only found their articulation into a cohesive totum in the retina-mind of the viewer, somehow paralleling the collective perception of reality at the time. The screen became here a window and also a magnifying glass, a distorting mirror that returned images of a Lacanian Other, an augmented, hyperreal version of our urban reality. Lit by the brightness of the screen, our world appeared as a Platonic reverberation, a pale reflection engendered in the darkened room. Arguably, it would be this ability to reproduce the ethos of reality, rather than any attempt at prediction that would make it stand the test of time as the paradigmatic visualization of the future for more than fifty years[24].

BLADE RUNNER AND THE POSTMODERN CITY: THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE WINDOWTop

All these aspects were touched upon and amplified it drastically in a film that, half a century later, took Metropolis’ torch as the über-portrayal of the future. Progressively turned into a favouritee text of post-modernity by academic and popular literature alike, Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) renewed, after many years of space fiction and a few less of urban disaster cinema, the symbiotic relationship between cinema and the contemporary city. Moreover, it did so through a portrayal of the future, which, to a certain extent, took this symbiosis at the point where Metropolis had left it[25]. In 1927, the critic of Life magazine stated in his review of the film: ‘there is altogether too much of Metropolis... too much scenery, too many people, too much plot, and too many platitudinous ideas’[26]. There was, indeed, a lot of everything in Metropolis, and Scott’s film took this saturation and updated it for the postmodern era, exponentially increasing it in the process, and making a portrayal of the (eminently urban) space of postmodernity that appeared in a striking contiguity with the space of proto-modernity depicted by Metropolis. It could not be otherwise: Scott’s future was built taking as the neon-lit metropolis of the Asian-American reality of the 1980s, in the end, a 50 year older version of the reality that Lang had used as a trigger an a template.

Adding to this, the genealogy of Blade Runner’s approach to the design and construction of space -one would be tempted to qualify it as ‘production’- also has precedents within Scott’s own cinematographic production. Three years before the film hit the screen, Scott had already revolutionized science fiction with another film: Alien (1979). Created amidst the ‘mega-structural’ trend that took hold of science fiction in the 1970s (with Silent Running, 1972), and particularly in the second half of the decade (Star Wars, 1977; Space: 1999, 1975-7; Battlestar Galactica, 1978; The Black Hole, 1979), Alien was the first instalment in what we could qualify as Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk trilogy, which started in outer space, and in the far future of 2122, followed through with the earthly L.A. of 2019, and ended in a contemporary, but dark, oppressive and post-industrial Japan in Black Rain (1989). All three unrelated films had in common the perception of reality as a superimposed, multi-layered environment, where decay combined with a superlative preferentiality that obfuscated the senses, creating a very specific depiction of postmodern space.

Alien already featured Ridley Scott’s trademark ‘layering’ method: his first film, the period piece The Duelists (1977), had garnered critical acclaim for its lush visuals, where Scott masked his limited budget by “building up a dense, kaleidoscopic accretion of detail within every frame and set[27]”. Alien translated this method to the design of a renewed science fiction where George Lucas’s Star Wars had already introduced the concept of ‘used future’[28]. Thus, unable to design everything from scratch, sets were constructed by creating a basic plywood structure on top of which an array of different elements was applied. Roger Christian, the set designer scavenged through aircraft scrap yards all around the UK[29], buying and dismantling old planes, and rearranging their parts on top of the flat surfaces. Thus, the design showed an inner logic, provided by the common origin of its parts, while also portraying the desired complexity of a structure that was both futuristic in nature, but also old, in the context of the story: “ I think the audience accepted that we’d gone out and found a spaceship, rented it and filmed inside it, and that it was old and battered and used[30].” (Figure 4).

By gradually adding layers and layers of detail, Alien evoked the complexity of reality, rarely present in classic science fiction, and also added a layer of plausibility: as in Metropolis, the innards of the Nostromo, with their industrial look, didn’t appear to the viewer as “a spacetime to come, but a space-time that will have been[31]”. It did not look like a set whose life started at the moment that cameras started rolling, but rather an old, heavily retrofitted structure, where new elements had been added as new requirements appeared, and rust, dust and the texture of time had left their mark. Like Lang, Scott did not refrain from including a mishmash of elements from multiple sources: golden columns looking like technological translations of Bernini’s Solomonic columns in his Baldachino for Saint Peter, white walls padded with cushions in psychiatric-cell style, corridors covered with different arrays of piping... Only the density of elements and the common patina of time made all of them look like part of the same universe.

All these strategies can also be identified in the construction of Blade Runner’s urban space, only dramatically amped up, and scaled up to urban proportions. Blade Runner took from Metropolis the referential amplitude and the stratified approach to the urban landscape, with an upper cityscape of disparate, mega-structural skyscrapers that stood over a congested street scene of overlapping levels. In between them, the film updated Lang’s trip through the vertical metropolis, where cars an aeroplanes merging into flying ‘spinners’ that moved with an expanded freedom in a perpetual night punctuated by myriads of individual lights and facades turned into screens. On an iconographic level, many connections can be made between both films: the New Tower of Babel, which occupies a central position in Lang’s film, is split in two different characters in L.A. 2019. If in Alien, one of the most notable architectural designs was a space refinery with strong Gothic Cathedral undertones, here Lang’s skyscraper found an echo in two structures: both the urban and symbolic roles are taken over by the twin truncated pyramids of the Tyrell Corporation, which unleash a myriad of connections. They stand like cathedrals of economic power, linking with their shape the omnipotence of Egyptian pharaohs with the absolute power of capitalism as pictured in the dollar bill. At the same time, they evoke a whole section of visionary architecture, from the many ziggurats by Henri Sauvage and the architects of the Titan City Hugh by Ferriss, Francisco Mújica[32]), Antonio Sant’Elia’s futurism, and the mega-structural pyramids of the 1960s. In terms of its shape, Lang’s ‘blooming sunflower’ Art Nouveau was mirrored by the subtle Art Nouveau of the Police Headquarters building, a round skyscraper also provided with a landing deck on its roof, which also doubles as a stand-in for the Chrysler Building in New York, a location considered by Scott before fnally deciding on L.A[33] (Figure 5).

All this underlined and amplified the ‘mental’ -in its different meanings- nature of the city, as referential omnivorousness was taken to the limit. ‘Postmodern space recycles’, says Giuliana Bruno, in his reading of the film, and L.A. 2019 is a paradigmatic exercise on iconographic recycling[34]. Nominally L.A., but also resembling ‘New York, Hong Kong or Tokyo… [q]uoting from different real cities, postcards, advertising, movies’, the postmodern metropolis of 2019/1982 appears as ‘a polyvalent, interchangeable structure, the product of geographical displacements and condensations’ quoting ‘not only from different spatial structures but from temporal ones as well.’ It a place where ‘syntactic rules are broken down... and replaced by a parataxis, a regulated aesthetic of lists’ that works through the logic of pastiche, fostering quotations of a synchronic and diachronic order[35].” As such, we find ties to many points of the History and the Geography of Architecture, but also of cinema and science fiction, and even some real L.A. locations: shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, the 2nd Street Tunnel that appears in so many films, the Million Dollar Theatre or the Bradbury Building are scattered throughout the film, but their topological relationships between them are never clear, disrupted, or even vary from one shot to the other. At one point in the film, The Bradbury seems to be in a position similar to its real one. However, when Deckard exits through a window later in the film, the shot shows us the building impossibly extending downwards, thus negating its connection to the real city. In a certain way, the window, which seems to link unrelated spaces, becomes a precursor of the ‘hyper-linkage’ of video-gaming space.

Like in Metropolis, the connective tissue between the different visions of the city Blade Runner offers is never made explicit: the city is subsequently presented as an industrial Hades, a rundown and congested street scene, a series of overlapping platforms, a magnificent landscape of skyscrapers... but the way in which all these elements converge in a cohesive geography is left to the viewer’s imagination. Adding to this confusion, the recycling game also happens within the very movie, with the same elements appearing in different positions, playing different roles in different scenes, ultimately making Blade Runner a ‘geography of de-localization’, which creates in the viewer both a subliminal feeling of consistency, but also of estrangement (Figure 6). In her reading of postmodern science fiction, Vivian Sobchack notes that it is space rather than time which “dominates our conscience and maintains our experience”. Time suffers from a deflation that causes the schizophrenia that Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari and others identify as the basic postmodern vital condition. According to Jameson, “[t]he schizophrenic does not have our experience of temporal continuity but is condemned to live a perpetual present”, and as a consequence, “…as temporal continuity breaks down, the experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and ‘material[36].

The epitome of this vividness happened at the street level, a future version of the ‘medievalized’ street of film noir: a congested space full of activities, texture and people[37]. Like in Alien, this aspect stemmed from the conditions in which the film was produced, and in turn, reflected the socio-economic conditions portrayed by the film. Scott’s was a world “ ...in a state of overkill... where you can no longer remove a building because it costs far more than constructing one in its place. (...) Once a structure like the Empire State building goes up, it’s probably going to be there for… you name it. (...) So it’s a physical feeling you get about that society[38]. Again, budgetary constraints prevented from building sets from scratch, so it was decided to retrofit an existing set, the ‘Old New York Street’ in Warner Bros’ Studios in Burbank where films such as John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) had been shot, physically constructing the future on top of the past. If, as Bruno says, “postmodernism recycles”, Blade Runner did this to an exceptional degree: echoing the replicants’ obsession with collecting photographs of a mostly fictional past, the same happens with their environment. Blade Runner’s city is in this sense, a chronopolis, a ‘city of time’ which collects and displays, like rings in a tree trunk, all its subsequent pasts, kept in place, held together by parasitic structures that gain mega-structural status as we zoom out.

Thus, as Philip K. Dick himself admitted, the whole ended up looking and feeling like “a lived-in world. A world (...) where people live. And the cars use gas and are dirty and there is kind of a gritty rain falling and it’s smoggy. It’s just terribly convincing when you see it.[39]” It was a world, in the end, with the texture and complexity of reality itself. As with Lang’s Metropolis, Blade Runner’s success lay not so much in its innovations, its rupture with the past, but rather in its continuation and expansion on the present. In an early meeting for the film, Ridley Scott asked Hampton Fancher, author of the original screenplay: “Hampton, this world you’ve created –what’s outside the window?” To a great extent, the world “outside the window” was the very reality of the 1980s[40]. LA 2019 was an agglutination and amplification of the world 1982, which caused an equally uncomfortable and fascinating feeling both of estrangement and familiarity in the viewer. As such, it rapidly found its way into academic literature as a favouritee text of postmodern studies. Built as a cacophonic version of reality, made with thousands of fragments of it, Blade Runner gave us, as E.H. Gombrich would put it, new codes to conceptualize reality, a new way to look at it. But also, due to this symbiotic relationship, it also crossed the screen, making reality itself look like the film[41].

Blade Runner cast a shadow on many aspects of our physical reality, from fashion to architecture and graphic design, and also on the development of science fiction. Even if the film predated the official encoding of the genre, Blade Runner’s gritty, ‘hi tech and low life’ neo-noir style helped shape the image of cyberpunk, as well as establish it as the default mode of imagining the future. It also helped sci-fi cinema rediscover the city as the connatural ecosystem of post-modernity, renewing a relationship that had been on a hiatus from the 1930s to the 1970s, and introducing a post-industrial, dark and realistic approach that still remains today. Blade Runner became the standard upon which science fiction cinema would be measured, and many films tried to reproduce the same ability to capture the ethos of reality displayed by Scott’s, creating in the process many different doppelgangers of the contemporary American city that worked as hyper-real reflections and texts to read it. Blade Runner’s portrayal would still remain unmatched, staying both as a model and an unattainable ideal.

AN INTERACTIVE WINDOW. VIDEO GAMES AND THE REPLICATION OF THE POSTMODERN EXPERIENCETop

One of the most seminal modern influences, not just on videogames but on all forms of science fiction, is the film Blade Runner. (...) For the vision of neon-soaked streets at night in a skyscraper-studded, futuristic Tokyo [sic) was particularly amenable to videogames’ limited powers of representation.[42]

Inevitably, the emerging video-game industry soon joined this pursue to capture what Barry Atkins has characterized as ‘The Blade Runner Experience’. This is only nature, if we consider that video games appeared, in a way, as the ultimate window: a window to another world where the viewer also became an actor, interacting with the world on the other side. Adding to this, virtual reality and the cyberspace were soon popularized the cyberpunk genre, which Blade Runner was seminal in establishing, while issues such as replication and the interaction with sentient machinery were at the core both of Philip K. Dick’s novel and Ridley Scott’s film. However, the development of the medium had not reached the point where videogames could translate any of the complexity of the film, and Blade Runner had to wait some years until some timid attempts to capture some of its qualities started to appear in video gaming platforms. As with cinema, the late 1980s saw some games embracing the cyberpunk genre or at least some of its tropes, which also entailed touching upon some aspects of the Blade Runner Universe: replicants and androids, the tech-noir atmosphere and the dilapidation of the urban scene, along with the cyberspatial elements that William Gibson and Bruce Sterling introduced with their novels.

One of the earliest entries was the still rudimentary Snatcher (1988), a point-and-click adventure designed by Hideo Kojima that drew heavily both from Blade Runner and from the Japanese developments of the genre in manga and anime after the publication of the influential Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1982-90). A more dynamic approach was adopted in the cyberpunk-themed games Syndicate (1993), and its sequel, Syndicate Wars (1996). Here the link with Blade Runner became more tenuous, once the congested urban scene is abandoned in favour of open, hi-tech spaces. A more decided focus on world building was featured in the commercially unsuccessful but visually engaging Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) (Figure 7.1). Designed by British comic artist Dave Gibbons, the game was set in a fictional dystopian city in Australia that built on the imagery of the ‘industrial Hades’ presented in Blade Runner’s opening shots, zooming into its architecture and urban spaces. Industrial undertones and urban density notwithstanding, the atmosphere of the game drifted away from the congestion of Blade Runner, presenting a mostly deserted environment more in line with the sandy landscapes of Australian science fiction films such as Hardware (Richard Stanley, 1990), which followed the post-apocalyptic trend started in the late 1970s by George Miller’s Mad Max (1979). The colour palette, rich in yellowish and orange tones, underlined this connection.

Environmental design aside, none of these examples came even close to replicating the intensity of the urban experience that the spectator had when watching the film, burdened by ‘lateral scrolls’ or ‘top down’ points of view that helped playability, but worked against the player’s ‘immersion’, or the creation of an oppressive, suffocating atmosphere, not to mention a spatially complex urban scene. These aspects would be improved in subsequent sagas, such as the series Shadowrun (1993 - 2015) (Figure 7.3), which displayed an increasing atmospheric congestion in its different instalments, while progressively introducing many of Blade Runner’s styleme, such as the ubiquitous neon signs, and the general patina of dirt and decrepitude. The saga Fallout (1997-2001 / 2004-nowadays), set in a deserted post-apocalyptic world would also venture occasionally in dense derelict urban sceneries, particularly in the still under development Project V13, which takes the series into a role-playing video game environment. Possibly the game which, still within this gaming logic, where the player controls an avatar that moves in an environment presented typically from bird’s eye view, comes closer to capturing the Blade Runner experience is the more recent Satellite Reign (2015). Design-wise, the game is an ode to Scott’s film, with its neon-lit streets, facades turn into advertising screens, pill-swallowing geishas, and steam clouds. Spatially it also echoes some aspects of the film, with the street scene splitting in different overlapping levels that climb downwards into the innards of the city, referencing some early concepts of the film, but also some unused shots, which it reproduces almost literally, offering the player the feeling of being exploring the less privileged areas of L.A. 2019. The latter is achieved mostly thanks to a technique provided by the technical achievements that are now available to game developers: in this case, the introduction of a third (vertical) vanishing point that imbues the game with a further realism, while also introducing a sense of vertigo in the urban scene of which it greatly benefits.

Adding to its effect on this entire cyberpunk offspring, the game also spawned to video game adaptations. The first one, simply titled Blade Runner (CRL Group PLC, 1985) (Figure 7.6), was mostly an ‘in name only’ adaptation. The game was inspired by Vangelis’ soundtrack, rather than by the film itself, and presented a rather mundane ‘shoot ‘em up’ routine with a horizontal scroll, together with some scant references to the film’s design, drastically limited in their success by the technology available at the time. Blade Runner (Westwood Studios, 1997), usually referred to as Blade Runner PC was a vast improvement. Benefitting from the dramatic leap in video-gaming technology, but also from the sophistication of video game culture, and even if it might be a little rough by today’s standards, the game was the result of a considerable effort to mimic the visuals of the film, digitally replicating entire shots and expanding on its universe by creating new ‘sets’ that built on the design concepts shown in it. Moreover, it was conceived to all effects as a sequel to the film. Constructed as an elaborate point-and-click adventure, the story of the game was concurrent with that of the film, weaving it “into the existing film narrative allowed the players to immerse themselves in the film world without requiring them to replay events they have already seen[43]”. The game was a love tribute to the film and its creators full with references to Phillip K. Dick’s work, with the original actors recording voice-overs for the characters, and music faithful to the spirit of Vangelis’ soundtrack.

The accomplishments of Blade Runner PC are even more noticeable if we compare it to some of the better Blade Runner copycats of its period, such as the similarly themed Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy (1998), and flight simulators G-Police (Psygnosis, 1997), or Einhänder (Square, 1997). “Above all the Blade Runnergame is a simulation», Castle explains, and to a certain extent, it allowed its users to enter a world which, as Norman Klein notes, had even entered the imagination of urban planners[44]. Still, when compared to the film it is based on, it still falls short of its goal. For all its accomplishments, the game could not match the congestion, scale and texture of the original. From a purely experiential point of view, it lacked the immersive quality of the film, where the viewer felt in many scenes as one more character following Deckard, with crowds passing by in the corners of vision. The game showed the player’s avatar as a third person, seen slightly from above, who walked through mostly empty spaces: “Blade Runner PC lacks many of the advantages of film, such as a controlled sense of pace and the shifts in shot whose absence is less obvious in more frantic game genres... [it] simply cannot compete with the visual polish of the film.”[45].

THE EYE AND THE ‘I’: VIDEOGAMES, VIRTUAL REALITY AND THE EXPERIENCE OF SPACETop

However, continuous developments in computer visualization are quickly changing this, at a point where these past visions of the future have become part of (post)modern culture’s mythology, helped by the increasingly self-referentiality of visual media. Alien: Isolation, completed by Creative Assembly in 2014 stands as a perfect example of the new ways in which the immediate future can change our relationship with these cultural icons, as well as the role that they can play as triggers to re-imagine our reality, present and future. Presented, following contemporary cinema trends, as a sequel/remake of the first film in the Alien series, Isolation presents the player with the possibility to experience the events of the film, both literally, and through a new story that parallels the original one. Set 15 years after the events of the film, the plot follows Amanda Ripley, only daughter of the main character of Alien, in a horror adventure through the Sevastopol, a space station that takes the role of the flying refinery of the 1979 film.

In this sense, Alien: Isolation is less of an adaptation than an extension of Scott’s film, which has been designed with the same attention to detail, and following the same design criteria (Figure 8). In order to do so, the design team studied the concept design produced for the film, as well as the miniatures and sets, and built from there. Thus, the design of the game was approached as a respectful, mannerist exercise of induction which, in a Viollet-le-Ducesque genetic understanding of style, extrapolated a whole world from the existing material[46]. In order to achieve the maximum level of consistency, even the original techniques used by the FX team were reproduced digitally, and again, the original actors were hired to reprise their roles via voiceovers, an element that was crucial for the two DLC expansions of the game, ‘Crew Expendable’ and ‘Last Survivor’, which enabled the player to reenact two scenes from the film seen from the point of view of their character of choice, or even explore the alternative scenarios of some well-known deleted scenes. Isolation hints, in this sense, at the possible evolution of cinema towards hyper-cinematography, where the spectator can inhabit the film he is watching, and explore it at will, while video games can coexist as a medium to expand films. The latter is a possibility that is becoming more and more likely, in a context in which both production techniques, means, and also production budgets of both mediums are closer each day[47] (Figure 9).

Of course, the experience within the videogame will always differ from that of watching the film. First of all, it varies because of the position of the player within the space, but also because the very construction of space differs. As noted before, in film topological relationships between spaces, and within each space vary depending on the needs of the shot. The spaces of film are designed for the eye of the camera (a certain lighting, a specific lens), and as such, they may be redressed from one shot to the next multiple times, which is particularly true in the films of Ridley Scott, a director who will play fast and loose with continuity in order to get the perfect shot each time. Spaces are sometimes designed to work best when viewed from a different angle, and being able to move through them, examining them up close and from different perspectives might turn them uninteresting, or simply destroy the illusion. Finally, cinema works, except for rare occasions, with continuous ellipsis, and consequently, with a discontinuous, fragmentary space. This might make it sometimes difficult for the viewer to reconstruct spatial relationships or itineraries, but it also allows the filmmaker to play with the viewer’s imagination, which will fill the voids with what he is given, and if he is provided with extraordinarily complex fragments, he will extrapolate an extraordinarily complex world linking them. As Jorge Luis Borges noted, “[t]he solution to the mystery is always inferior to the mystery itself[48].” In many aspects, video games do not have this advantage: they present spaces that have to be continuous, at least at a local level, and maintain their features in all angles and at all scales.

THE SOUNDS OF (HYPER)REALITYTop

However, there are other dimensions of cinematographic space that disappear in real life, which video games can keep[49], and use to great effect. One of the key elements in the recreation of Alien’s authenticity lay in the creation of a soundtrack (by Joe Henson and Alexis Smith) which, following the same production logic, replicated and expanded on Jerry Goldsmith’s themes for Alien. Sound and music are integral to the emotional experience of watching the film, particularly in horror films, which, as K.J. Donelly explains, exemplify, due to their extremity, the way film music works[50]. This is particularly true of ‘survival horror’, a genre where the camera usually follows a single character’s development, often from a first person’s point of view, thus ‘more self-consciously cinematic in its presentation[51]’. Here, film music can be translated more faithfully, even if with some fundamental differences: music in videogames has to adapt to an almost infinitely variation in the development of events, and has to be adaptive[52]. Still, music is one of the elements that make Isolation’s simulation of Alien’s experience so successful.

However, these comments could be extended to every genre and also to the perception, both cognitive and emotional, of space. When watching a film, the viewer loses some of the sensorial information attached to space in real life (odour, humidity, haptic qualities). Sound, and the information it carries, is preserved, but music also adds other complementary information that reality lacks. In Alien, Goldsmith’s lush orchestrations help the spectator feel the magnificence of the vast interiors of the Nostromo, but the howling sounds, or the four recurrent notes played by the horns as we explore its corridors, also characterize the space, endowing it with a disquieting, haunting quality. This interpenetration is even more prominent in Blade Runner, a film where sound is “baked into the DNA of the movie itself. All the audio that you hear, including score, sound design, and dialogue, it’s tightly integrated. Each blurs into the others[53].” In the same way that the designers applied a common patina that gave the architectural collage a cohesive look, the composer Vangelis used the reverb produced by synthesizers to blend all sounds together, “[folding] separate audio sources into one aural master track...” comprised both of diegetic (produced by the events of the film) and acousmatic (with no visible source) sounds[54]. Working with a rough cut of the film, Vangelis designed the entire soundtrack to blend with the images in what he called an ‘organic’ soundtrack, the result of an emotional, rather than cerebral, response to the narrative which works with mechanical precision.

Sound is, in Blade Runner, essential in building the atmosphere of the world it depicts, including its architecture and urban scene. As Andrew Stiller notes, “Heavy reverb—because it implies a huge, enclosed, hard-surfaced space—creates a mood of paranoia[55].” It also helps confer an oppressive sense of scale and awe to the already asphyxiating architectural imagery, combined with the sounds of mitigating explosions, and adds to the many mechanical sounds that appear throughout the film (the movement of mechanical doors sliding, the buzz of neon tubes, the continuous humming), subconsciously informing the viewer of the artificial nature of the reality he is beholding. It ultimately underlines the post-human condition of Blade Runner’s world. Similarly, the multi-ethnic and multi-temporal origins of the music and sounds, extracted from different geographies, cultures, and time periods instils a schizophonia[56] that, contributes to the overall schizophrenic design. Sound was, in the end, one more layer -with many layers of its own- in Scott’s ‘ layer cake’ that contributed an atmospheric and textural quality fundamental in the film’s experience[57]. The city of film offers, in this sense, an opportunity to create a total design in a way unavailable to the design of our built environment. Here, the designer controls the experience of the spectator in further ways, qualifying the perception of space in subliminal ways, and video-games, in their intersection with virtual reality, become the next natural step: an environment where reality itself becomes a gesamtkunstwerk apprehended with augmented perception: a true augmented reality.

THE ULTIMATE WINDOW. FROM BLADE RUNNER TO VIRTUAL REALITYTop

It could be argued that the promise of this leap into virtual reality was in fact implicit in the film, in shots such as the one in which, in a nod to one of the vaudevillesque tricks used by the Lumières[58], a snapshot briefly came to life, activated by the viewers glance, the character of Rick Deckard. One of the most memorable moments, among many, was, however, the scene in which Deckard, using an ‘Esper’ machine, examines a photograph. Voicing out loud the instructions that a film director would give to his cameraman (“Pull out, track right”), Deckard makes the machine zoom in different zones of the image, in and enhanced revision of Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’ (1969)[59]. At first, the viewer is tricked into thinking that he is just being presented with a simple exploration of a flat image, improved by robotic tools. However, as the process went on, he started feeling a cognitive dissonance, as the eye of the machine suddenly changed the point of view of the still, and looked behind corners, making it clear that the picture was actually a three-dimensional recording of the reality it had photographed. Thus, it introduced several relevant themes: one of them fits within the film’s exploration of memories. Typically, photographs are, to a great extent, fragments of the visual experience of the photographer, recording what he was looking at, through the camera´s eye, at a certain point in time. Here, the overlap disappears, since the recording goes much further, encompassing things the photographer hadn’t seen. Another thread has to do with the postmodern obsession with surfaces, and the ‘flatness’ of visual culture[60]. Finally, it introduced a very compelling visualization of the promises of virtual reality: the possibility of entering a space, walk through it and freely examine it.

Alien: Isolation does this to a limited, but still exceptionally effective extent. Of course, it benefits from its routine as a ‘first person shooter’, a genre where the player’s ability to “enter the space on the screen” before him and ‘negotiate’ what Henry Jenkins has called its ‘narrative architecture’ while giving little to no attention to the practice of manipulating the interface between player and game” is much higher[61]. Much of the footage of the film had the viewer peeping from Ripley’s back as she advanced through the Nostromo’s corridors, which had been introduced earlier in the film through extensive, morose tracking shots. Experiencing the space of the film (in digital simulation) through the eyes of the main character was just the next logical step, as well as the closest way to emulate the tension the viewer feels while watching it. On the verge of the year 2019 where Blade Runner was set, different multimedia projects are trying to capture, emulate, expand, or augment the sensorial experience of the architectural and urban atmospheres of the film. In some cases, it is the texture and feel of the original that is being searched for, in short films such as XXIT (Sam Nicholson/ Stargate Studios, 2011) (Figure 10.2), Tears in the Rain (Christopher Grant Harvey, 2017), or especially Slice of Life (Luka Hrgović, 2017--) (Figure 10.1). The latter goes as far as to adopt the filming and special effects techniques used in the 1980s, in order to capture that ‘physical feeling’ of the original that has been lost with the overuse of digital tools, a feeling that even the much awaited -and feared- sequel, the beautifully shot, lyrical Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) has failed to grasp[62].

On the other hand, the will to inhabit the world of the original film has not ceased to be an object of desire of postmodern culture that virtual reality seems to be on the verge of making true, at least in its digital simulation. Such are cases as software engineer Quentin Lengelé’s Project BR9732[63] (Figure 11),an independent attempt that offers the viewer to emulate Deckard’s ESPER experience, and instead explore a digital reconstruction of his apartment, as it was shown in the film. With the help of an Oculus Virtual Reality headset, the viewer “can walk around, look at details, pick some objects, play the piano, take a shower, start the Esper machine and enjoy the rain falling on the balcony[64]”. Other attempts, this time from an official source, were the two Virtual Reality games that Alcon films produced to accompany the opening of the film. Blade Runner 2049: Replicant Pursuit, and Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab (Figure 12) were intended as complementary explorations into the world of the new film, which in the vein of Isolation, hired real actors to play the virtual characters, and painstakingly tried to build a virtual environment that recreated the ambiance of the original film[65].

Still, the ability of these recent efforts to emulate the spatial, morphological, textural, and, in general, atmospheric, of the film experience is somewhat limited, but the ability of a total immersion in this world makes up for its shortcomings. At the same time, other non-directly related video game productions show that the possibility to replicate the filmic reality of Blade Runner is near. Cyberpunk games such as Hard Reset (2011/12), inspired by the literary works of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, the last instalments of the Deus X series (particularly Deus Ex: Human Revolution, 2011), or the more recent Observer (2017), which features Rutger Hauer, the main antagonist in Scott’s film, in an acting role, are vivid examples of how close current digital visualization techniques are to offering a facsimile experience of, at least, parts of the films world. Meanwhile, ‘open world’ platforms such as Cyberpunk 2077 (2012-ongoing) offer a glimpse where the future of gaming is heading: experiences that leave behind traditional linear narratives, and develop alter realities that the player can explore at will. All of them testify to the ongoing -increasing, in fact- interest in revisiting these alternative futures that have become so entrenched in our collective imagination.