CRAFT & ENCODE present: Screening of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (USA 1982)

Based on the short story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep written by Philip K. Dick in 1968, Ridley Scott's movie Blade Runner takes us to a dystopian future where synthetic humans – so-called replicants – are bio-engineered and used to do dangerous and low-esteemed work on space colonies.

Indistinguishable from ‘normal’ humans regarding appearance and behavior, but superior to them in terms of both cognitive and physiological capabilities, replicants are portrayed as slave-like and rightless forms of life that are exploited and kept in check by, among other things, a life expectancy that has been deliberately reduced to only a couple of years. We follow main protagonist Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a police officer tasked with finding and ‘retiring’ replicants who have escaped from their lot. In the movie, Deckert searches for a group that has come to Earth with the objective of apprehending their maker. During this mission, he discovers a secret that challenges everything he believed and blurs distinctions between humans and replicants as well as right and wrong.

Ridley Scott’s film opens up troubling philosophical questions regarding artificial human life, freedom, autonomy, and the importance of retaining the right to know who you really are that foreshadow issues currently debated in relation to AI and machine learning. With the haunting cinematography of Jordan Cronenweth and the eerie musical theme developed by Vangelis, Blade Runner appears as a proper classic everyone should have seen on 'the big screen' at least once in their lifetime.

We will show the director's cut of the 1982 version (that among other things contains the original ending) in 35 mm format.

The screening of Blade Runner is the second part of the film series CRAFT&ENCODE present... and takes place at Verdensteatret Cinematek on Wednesday April 12 from 18:00 (English original with Norwegian subtitles).

Introduction by Zoheb Mashiur (CRAFT/UIT) and opportunity for q/a after the screening.

See announcement at Verdensteatret here.

Tickets can be purchased here.

About the film series:

CRAFT & ENCODE present is a series of film screenings at Verdensteatret Cinematek on autonomous technologies, artificial intelligence, and changing relations between humans and machines arranged by the CRAFT-research group and the ENCODE network at UiT.

In the spring term of 2023 the CRAFT-research group (BFE/UiT) and the ENCODE-network (HSL/UiT) have started a series of film screenings in cooperation with Verdensteatret Cinematek. The initiative is aimed at facilitaing the dissemination of research results from associated projects such as AGiC (NordForsk 2020-22), AFO-JIGG (RCN 2021-24) or Futures4Fish (RCN 2023-26), and at improving recruitment to relevant study programmes at BFE and HSL.

Each semester, scholars associated with CRAFT and/or ENCODE will select three movies that take up pressing issues such as automation and the development of autonomous technical systems, the implications of rapid advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the societal, political, cultural, and economic ramifications of digitization, and the changing relations between humans and machines. Each film will be introduced by a scholar associated with the groups. After the screenings there will be an opportunity to ask questions and discuss issues taken up in the movies.

The film series is organized by CRAFT (BFE) and ENCODE (ISK/HSL) and supported by Verdensteatret Cinematek.

CRAFT & ENCODE present: Screening of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (USA 1982) at Verdensteatret Cinematek