Blade Runner Light Saber LED Shaft Flash Light Umbrella BLACK BLUE RED

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You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you.

Los Angeles, 2019. Bursts of flame erupt over a city bathed in perpetual twilight. From the pyramid-like offices of the Tyrell Corporation, we see an eye in close-up, the lights of the city reflected in it. Whether this eye is human is yet to be determined. But, ultimately, in Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi masterwork, the eye of the beholder is irrelevant. In the world of Blade Runner the future is a hardscrabble hellscape with no escape. Is it any wonder, then, that Rutger Hauer’s band of rogue replicants – humanoid worker robots designed to blend in with the flesh and blood population – have decided to go rogue, pursuing a semblance of agency in the last days of their pre-programmed lives? Now that November of 2019 has passed, it’s a shame that some of the predictions made in Blade Runner for this future haven’t yet come true. Oh sure, 109 million people living in Los Angeles would be fun and all, but until we get our flying cars, we’ll just have to console ourselves with the ability to “Enhance!” photographs. While the new service, AI Image Enlarger, can’t tease out three-dimensional information, the app is intended to sharpen enlargements of low-resolution images, improving the focus and bringing up details in the darker parts of the image. The marketing material claims that the app uses machine learning, and is looking for volunteers to upload high-resolution images to improve its training set.

Of course, the most referenced and telling connection between Alien and Blade Runner is how they share what is essentially the same tech. In Alien when Sigourney Weaver prepares to fire up her escape lifeboat from the Nostromo, she revs the engines by commencing to “Purge” them. Livingston, Paisley. 2006. Theses on cinema as philosophy. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1): 11–18. Andersen, Nathan. 2005. Is film the alien other to philosophy? Philosophy as film in Mulhall’s On Film. Film and Philosophy 9: 1–11.

And as Alien is set in 2122 while Blade Runner occurs in 2019, the 2093 setting of Prometheus makes the most sense from a technological level. Roy Batty is fiercely soulful and independent while David is just as intellectually curious but enjoys the upgrade of eternal life (Roy’s short lifespan contributed to his madness). Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The world viewed: Reflections on the ontology of film, enlarged edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. With its non-automatic control, this umbrella is easy to open and close, providing you with hassle-free protection from the rain. Its long-handle design offers comfortable grip and effortless manoeuvrability, making it suitable for adults of all ages. Prometheus’ David is the perfect bridge between the two. He has a more complicated set of motivations and aspirations than Ash, and he savors living like Roy Batty while being crueler than either. He’ll wipe out whole civilizations for his own ends.

Erv’ Plecter] replaced the central support rod for the umbrella with a clear polycarbonate tube. An optic cable snakes through the hollow tube, illuminated by a Luxeon LED in the handle. The custom PCB and 900 mAh battery are both housed there as well. Take a look at (and listen to) the demo after the break. We’ll need to add this to our future projects list right after that Lightsaber movie replica build.

The LayerOne conference takes place in greater Los Angeles and this year it adopted a Blade Runner theme in honor of that landmark film. My favorite part of the theme was the conference badge modeled after a Voight-Kampff machine. These were used in the film to distinguish replicants from humans, and that’s exactly what this badge does too. In the movies, replicants are tested by asking questions and monitoring their eyes for a reaction — this badge has an optional eye-recognition camera to deliver this effect. Let’s take a look! Pate, Anthony. 2009. Nietzsche’s Übermensch in the hyperreal flux: An analysis of Blade Runner, Fight Club, and Miami Vice. Dissertations and Graduate Research Overview, Paper 15. http://digitalcommons.ric.edu/etd/15. Accessed 12 Aug 2019. It’s possible that Godard also intended the umbrella as a reference to the surrealists, who were fond of using them as symbols of the mystique and evocative power of everyday objects. In a recording he made to accompany Une femme est une femme, Godard says, “A red umbrella: Aragon,” referencing Louis Aragon and perhaps the motto that he and his fellow surrealists borrowed from the writings of the Comte de Lautréamont, who once described a young boy as “as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”. Often imitated but never fully replicated is Vangelis’ Golden Globe nominated synth score. Recorded on an Yamaha’s CS-80 synthesizer, these ambient textures were as vital to creating the universe of the film as the set design (which drew inspiration from Edward Hopper paintings and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis), costume, lighting and Orwellian ‘Cityspeak’ language invented for the film. That is because humans by and large have wrought a world of utilitarian uselessness in both films. And the people with real depth and souls are the robots built to serve them. Indeed, one can draw a through-line from Ian Holm’s Ash in Alien to Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty in Blade Runner to Michael Fassbender’s David in Prometheus. While the most recent of those three films is technically a prequel to Alien, it is also a bridge between the other two.Carroll, Noel. 2006. Philosophizing through the moving image: The case of Serene Velocity. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1): 173–185.