In 2018 I joined a long list of practitioners who have adapted Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick, 1968) as Blade Runner (Scott, 1982). This presentation considers Blade Runner as a transitional object - an artefact which is not a single thing but a matrix of ideas developed by a number of authors over a number of platforms. One result of this is that adaptations of either Dick’s ur-text or Scott’s ‘first’ adaptation come into being in a process which is multiple. The works that make up Blade Runner the transitional object are an entanglement of narrative threads which do not begin or end but are instead informed and enriched by their coalescence. As a result, any adaptation can be easily thought of as being a part of Blade Runner’s complex cultural whole and that any notions that a viewer may have concerning linear time in relation to that coalescence are quickly rendered redundant. This paper returns to my version, a double-sided flick-book titled A 35mm 208-ish Frame Version of Blade Runner (Topping, 2018), and considers the work and this paper as both adaptations and novel narrative threads which enrich and complicate the transitional cultural object known as Blade Runner.

• https://sfra.org/
• https://nyydiskultuur.artun.ee/en/
• https://kultuuriteadused.ut.ee/en