Scanner Darkly Research Articles

From a Botched Body without Organs to a Plastic Brain. A Reading of P.K. Dick’s "A Scanner Darkly"

This article analyzes the 1977 science-fiction novel A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, and focuses on the split personalities of the main character: Bob/Fred/Bruce. The reading is supplemented by the use of the concepts of Line of Flight and Body without Organs introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia as well as Catherine Malabou’s concept of brain plasticity. The article argues that the progressing deterioration of the protagonist’s mental state caused by drug abuse and social environment may be seen as a representation of a “botched BwO” – a body that has lost its productive potential and cannot be reintegrated into a stable territory. At the same time, I contend that the final chapter of the novel depicts a reparative transformation in which, thanks to brain plasticity, he is integrated into an autopoietic system of his environment.

Make-Believing Animated Films Featuring Digital Humans: A Qualitative Inquiry Using Online Sources

A qualitative inquiry of reviews of films featuring digital humanlike characters was performed by sampling user comments from three online reviewer aggregator sites: the Internet Movie Database, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. The films chosen for analysis were: Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (dir. Hironobu Sakaguchi and Motonori Sakakibara, 2001), The Polar Express (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2004), and Beowulf (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2007), all produced using CGI animation, together with A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, 2006) whose visuals are depicted by rotoscoping using Bob Sabiston’s Rotoshop software. The authors’ analysis identified individual differences in the viewing experience, particularly in relation to the uncertain ontology of the humanlike characters created using CGI (CGI-Humans). They found examples of reviews indicating an inability to distinguish between real and CGI-Human actors, observations of characters transiently exhibiting realism before returning to their artifice, and of characters being viewed as eerie (analogous to the uncanny valley), thus illustrating a complex and dynamic response to this phenomenon. In some situations, character uncanniness was related to the presence of an atypical feature such as movement of the eyes. Whilst specifically for Beowulf, perceptions became more problematic when there was familiarity with the actor playing the CGI-Human character, with some reviewers describing difficulties in categorizing the character as either real or animated. CGI-Human performances were also characterized by a lack of, or inappropriate, social interaction. Online reviewers did not perceive characters depicted using Rotoshop (Rotoshop-Humans) as eerie; rotoscoping was found to preserve, and possibly enhance, the natural social interactions between actors recorded from the live-action film which was used as the source material for the animation. The authors’ inquiry also identified user motivations for viewing these films and the importance placed by reviewers on the form of display when viewing the CGI films. They situate their interpretation of these findings in relation to Walton’s make-believe theory ( Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, 1990).

로토스코핑 기법을 통한 가상현실 영화의 미학적 활용 연구

디지털 기술의 발전과 함께 영화콘텐츠도 다양하게 변화하고 있다. 웹과 모바일 등의 플랫폼들이 개발되면서 이에 맞는 영화콘텐츠들이 등장하였다. 그러나 최근 화두가 되고 있는 가상현실 기술과 디바이스의 발달에도 불구하고 아직 영화콘텐츠 분야의 연구는 미비하다. 본 연구는 HMD(Head Mounted Display) 기반의 가상현실영화 제작을 위하여 로토스코핑 기법 활용한 영화의 미학적 활용을 중심으로 연구를 진행하였다. 먼저 기존의 가상현실 영화 중 그래픽 정보를 활용하여 미학적 표현을 한 사례인 'Notes on Blindness'와 'Pearl' 사례에서 어떻게 가상현실 공간을 미학적으로 표현하였는지를 살펴보았다. 이를 통해 그래픽화된 공간이 가상현실의 관객에게 새로운 미학적 경험을 제공하는 것을 발견하였다. 또한 실사기반 영상에 로토스코핑 기법을 활용한 '웨이킹 라이프' 와 '스캐너 다클리' 사례를 통해 로토스코핑 기법의 판타지적 활용과 성공 사례를 분석하였다. 마지막으로 실사기반의 가상현실 영화에서 관객의 몰입과 욕망의 충족을 위해 '그네 타는 소녀' 작품에 로토스코핑 기법을 적용하여 미학적으로 활용하였다. With the development of digital technology, a cinematic content has been changed into various forms. Web and mobile platforms bring new forms of cinematic contents. However despite of fast growing of VR(Virtual Reality) technology, they haven't applied to cinematic contents yet. This research focused on the esthetical use of rotoscoping technique for the Virtual Reality Cinema based on the (HMD) Head Mounted Display. First, we look though on VR films 'Notes on Blindness' and 'Pearl' to find how these films express esthetical virtual space. Through this, we found out graphical space provide new esthetical experience to viewers in virtual space. Also, we analyze fantastical usages and successful cases of rotoscoping technique with the 'Waking Life' and 'Scanner Darkly' that utilize rotoscoping technique to live action image. Lastly, we utilize rotoscoping technique esthetically to the VR film 'Girl on a swing' to fulfill the viewers experience and desire.

Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance in Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly

Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance in Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly

Watched Life: The Surveillance State as Seen on CCTV

Considering the influence of digital technologies generally, and filmic representations of dystopias specifically, this essay attempts to patrol the border between cinematic depictions of the surveillance societies dreamed up by Philip K. Dick, on the one hand, and the realities of our current law enforcement, social organizations and political institutions on the other hand. As filmmaker Richard Linklater suggests in his 2006 filmic adaptation of Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly, set in Los Angeles “seven years from now,” (which basic arithmetic tells us is the present year of 2013!), we have arrived at an era in which the surveillance architecture at present is teetering dangerously close to (or has arguably surpassed) those of the dystopian science fiction fantasy worlds dreamed up by some of the most imaginative literary minds of the twentieth century. Situated in between the realms of science-fiction fantasy and our present day reality, this essay considers the ways in which popular films like A Scanner Darkly (2006), Minority Report (2002), Gattaca (1997), Blade Runner (1982), The Truman Show (1998), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Enemy of the State (1998), as well as popular TV shows like Law and Order: Criminal Intent, The Wire, and Homeland inform our nation’s surveillance apparatus and how the surveillance apparatus is being represented and reimagined through cinematic techniques and technologies.

Philip K. Dick's Unconventional Dystopias

Since the earliest days of P. K. Dick scholarship the SFnal works of the Californian writer have been repeatedly labelled dystopian, even though such a categorization sounded more like a critical commonplace than the result of a painstaking and detailed analysis of his oeuvre. This article focuses on one of the most important novels written by Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977), and a less celebrated one, Radio Free Albemuth (1985), as the most interesting examples of his dystopian imagination. While skeptical about the contention that Dick's SF is mostly dystopian (as dystopia theories help us to tell the difference between dystopian and pessimistic narratives), these two novels show that their author reinterpreted the dystopian tradition stemming from Huxley, Orwell, and Zamjatin in a most original way through the figure of the informant, which becomes central both in Scanner and Albemuth, and constitutes one more embodiment of the characteristically Dickian split subjectivity.

Хетеротопија у „Убику“ и „Tамном скенирању“ Филипа К. Дика

Alternative spaces within the science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick can be analysed in the context of Michel Foucault’s six principles of heterotopia and some tendencies in the transformation of urban spaces. Heterotopias in Dick’s fiction act as ontological destabilisers that reconfigure the familiar and create new, alternative realities. In Ubik and A Scanner Darkly, by redefining and questioning the relations between the known spaces, Dick creates new, different, altered spaces, built on the border of reality and imagination, thus challenging the standard norms and generally accepted principles of perception, spatiality and linear time. Dick’s spaces, combined of imagination and reality, imply that there is more than one reality, as well as that reality perceived as objective is yet another illusion.

Everything is Animated: Pervasive Media and the Networked Subject

In a world of pervasive media and ubiquitous computing, this article asks what happens as everything (objects, subjects, and actions) moves toward animation across a network. How do media and mediation affect our sense of agency? I argue that the contemporary subject, as described by real-world media practice and animated film, exists within a space of accelerated mediation that distorts self-perception. I use the example of A Scanner Darkly, the 2006 Richard Linklater film, to discuss the effects of pervasive media and how it affects the parameters of self-reflection and agency. The importance of A Scanner Darkly to my argument is that it provides a vision of pervasive mediation in which subjects and objects collide. In A Scanner Darkly, I focus on the use of rotoscoping animation as visual effect and conceptual filter. Effectively, as I argue, animation is used in this case to illustrate the loss of face-to-face engagement – the impossibility of the unmediated encounter. In the first section of the article, I conceptualize a networked subject in reference to the film’s rendition of a subject adrift in a field of mediation. In the second section, I contrast this vision with a formulation of networked subjectivity that engages modalities of mediated presence to explore issues of agency in light of a technologically animated environment. The question I ask is: if as a society we are subjected to a pervasive mediation, how may we imagine modes of agency within an animated world?

‘Don’t Box Me In’: Blurred Lines in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly

This article seeks to evaluate the visual style of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, predominantly through an analysis of the films’ aesthetics. The use of Rotoshop as an expressive means to illustrate character and theme, where identity becomes sketched and multi-faceted rather than fixed or stable is explored here. Yet this aesthetic play with borders has a greater resonance than simply a means by which to delineate thematic preoccupations with troubled identity. While such representations are indeed key to these two films, the darkly outlined contours of character borders, which move and slide incessantly, also comment on the blurred divide between live action and animation. Central to the argument is the use of the animated line in understanding these two films; the line provides impetus for exploring several issues raised by the films and the use of Rotoshop. This article explores the following key ideas: the animated line and aesthetic analysis; Rotoshop technology; the representation of fragmentary identity; and the relationship between photo-real cinema and animation, with a particular focus on narrative and spectacle. The author addresses Rotoshop within the context of technology and spectacle; taking industry practices into account allows for an appreciation of how a technological innovation such as Rotoshop can change the shape of live-action cinema.

Roto-Synchresis: Relationships between Body and Voice in Rotoshop Animation

Rotoshop, a proprietary digital incarnation of rotoscoping, has been discussed as a visually innovative process, but its capacity to tread new ground aurally has been overlooked. However, the recurrent appearance of the ‘talking head’ in the Rotoshop animations to date invites critical reflection on the soundtrack of the films, as well as their images. This article follows Michel Chion in arguing that novel ways of altering bodies on-screen can involve a reimagining of the relationship between those bodies and their accompanying voices. Analyses of the experimental Rotoshop short Figures of Speech and the feature-length Indiewood productions, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, are used to demonstrate different possibilities in the coordination between voice and body. These range from an adherence to accepted conventions of lip-synchronization, which cast the voice as the guarantor of the body’s ‘authenticity’, to a much more free-floating assembly, in which words and bodily movements break down into independent elements of ‘pure form’.

How the criminal "shapes" the crime: a neurocognitive model for psychiatric forensic evaluation

Archibald, S. et al. 2001, Utilization behavior: Clinical manifestations and neurological mechanisms, Neuropsychology Review, 11, 117– 130. Baertschi, B. 2008, The burden of self-consciousness, Am J Bioethics, 8(9), 33-34. Blair, R.J.R. et al. 2001, A selective impairment in the processing of sad and fearful expressions in children with psychopathic tendencies, J. Abnorm. Child Psychol, 29, 491–498. Blair, R.J.R. 2007, The amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex in morality and psychopathy,Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol.11 No.9, 386-392. Blair, R.J.R. 2010, Neuroimaging of Psychopathy and Antisocial Behavior, Psychiatry Rep, 12, 76–82. Brown, T. & E.Murphy. 2010, Through a Scanner Darkly: Functional Neuroimaging as Evidence of a Criminal Defendantʼs Past Mental States, Stanford Law Review, Vol.62 Iss.4, 1119-1208. Cantagallo, A. et al. 2010, Verbal commands help the execution of endogenous movements in anarchic hand, Neuropsychol Rehabil; 20(3), 406-422. Cardellicchio, P., C. Sinigaglia, M. Costantini (in press), The space of affordances: a TMS study, Neuropsychologia. Clarke, A. & D.Chalmers. 1998, The extended mind, Analysis, 58, 10-23. Clark, A. 2008, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Coccaro, E.F., et al. 2011, Amygdala and orbitofrontal reactivity to social threat in individuals with impulsive aggression. Biol Psychiatry, 62, 168–178. Costantini, M., et al. 2010, Where does an object trigger an action? An investigation about affordances in space, Exp Brain Res, 207, pp. 95-103. Costantini, M., et al. 2011, Ready Both to Your and to My Hands: Mapping the Action Space of Others, PLoS ONE, Vol.6 Iss.4, 1-6. Dolan, M. & R. Fullam 2006, Face affect recognition deficits in personality-disordered offenders: association with psychopathy. Psychol. Med. 36, 1563–1569. Eslinger, P.J. 2002, The anatomic basis of utilisation behaviour, Cortex, 38 (3), 273-6. Frick, M.P.J., et al. 2003, Callous-unemotional traits and conduct problems in the prediction of conduct problem severity, aggression, and self-report delinquency, J. Abnorm. Child Psychol, 31, 457–47. Gallagher, S. 2003. Self-narrative in schizophrenia, in ed. David, A.S. & T. Kircher, The Self and Schizophrenia: A Neuropsychological Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 336-357. Gallagher, S. 2007, The natural philosophy of agency, Philosophy Compass, 2 (2), pp 347-357. Gallagher, S. 2010, Multiple aspects in the sense of agency, New Ideas in Psychology. Gallese, V., C. Sinigaglia. 2010, The bodily self as power for action, Neuropsychologia, N.48, 746-755. Glannon, W. 2009, Our brain are not us, Bioethics, 23, 321-329. Glannon, W. 2011, Diminishing and Enhancing Free Will, AJOB Neuroscience, Vol.3, 15-26. Kendler, K.S., et al. in press, A multivariate twin study of the DSM-IV criteria for ASPD, Biol Psychiatry. Lee, M.T.M., et al. 2008, Strong limbic and weak frontal activation to aggressive stimuli in spouse abusers, Mol Psychiatry, 13, 655–656. Lee, M.T.M., et al. 2009, Hyperresponsivity to threat stimuli in domestic violence offenders: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, J Clin Psychiatry, 70, 36–45 Mobbs, D. et al., 2007, Law, Responsibility and the Brain, PLoS Biology, Vol.5 Iss.4, 693-700. Pacherie, E. 2006, The phenomenology of action: a conceptual framework, Cognition, 107, 179-217. Pacherie, E. 2007, The Sense of Control and the Sense of Agency, Psyche, Vol.13, No.1, 1-30. Pacherie, E. 2010, Self-Agency, in S. Gallagher (ed), The Oxford Handbook of the Self, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Pacherie, E. 2011, The phenomenology of joint action: self-agency vs. joint-agency; Seeman, A. (ed.), Joint attention: new developments, Cambridge MA, MIT Press. Pietrini, P. & V. Bambini, 2009, Homo ferox: the contribution of functional brain studies to understanding the neural bases of aggressive and criminal behavior, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Vol.32, 259-265. Sundram, F., et al. in press, White matter microstructural abnormalities in the frontal lobe of adults with antisocial personality disorder, Cortex CONCLUSIVE CONSIDERATIONS: Recent works focus on the probative value of neuroscientific techniques (MRI, fMRI, PET, etc.) in courts. We argue that there is another more basic perspective to approach the relationship between neuroscience and law, that is to focus on its conditions of possibility and shifting its core to the psychiatric forensic evaluation.

The future(s) of risk: Barthes and Baudrillard go to Hollywood

Hollywood cinema is rarely acknowledged as an important counterpublic sphere which not only works to stimulate a critical and inclusive dialogue on the nature of risk technologies, but which also facilitates a deliberative engagement with the politics and ethics of risk management. And yet, it is commonplace for the futuristic films of the science fiction genre to take seriously the implications to ‘justice’ of intensified surveillance in liberal democratic societies faced with different kinds of risk. Filmic representations of ‘imagined’ technologies for responding to crime, especially those based on identificatory and predictive capacity, are typified in box office successes, such as Minority Report (2002), Paycheck (2003) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). These films may (simply) be entertaining as ‘action-packed’ science fiction thrillers. But they also create a Baudrillardian hyperreality which allows us to glimpse alternative frameworks of risk management which, ambiguously, reflect both the horror and the hope for systems of ‘justice’, law enforcement and punishment in a ‘risk society’. Through an analysis of these films, and drawing on Barthes’s notions of jouissance and the enigmatic, this paper explores the critical, subversive and disruptive possibilities of the simulated worlds of ‘Hollywood risk management’, paying particular attention to how they work to destabilize and scrutinize the conceptual scope and empirical instantiation of ‘risk’ as well as challenge its ethico-political meaning in contemporary life.

The aesthetics of pastiche in the work of Richard Linklater

This essay examines the work of contemporary film director Richard Linklater in the light of the concept of pastiche. After beginning with a brief overview of recent scholarship on pastiche, both in culture as a whole and in cinema, it argues that it is a structuring mode in three Linklater films: Dazed and Confused (1993), Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006). The purpose of the analysis is to assess both the films’ intellectual meaning and, specifically, the emotional resonance of the different varieties of pastiche they offer, in order to explore the affective possibilities associated with the mode. In this way, not only is it suggested that an understanding of the aesthetics of pastiche illuminates Linklater's films; conversely, examination of the rich and often innovatively conceived pastiche aesthetic that informs the director's work can be seen to open up understanding of the value and potentialities of pastiche itself.

Print Philip K. Dick on film in print

Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of 'Blade Runner'. Revised edition. London: Gollancz, 2007. xix+588pp. £16.99 (hbk).Jason P. Vest, Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at the Movies. London: Praeger, 2007. xviii+223pp. £29.95 (hbk).Brian J. Robb, Counterfeit Worlds: Philip K. Dick on Film. London: Titan, 2006. 317pp. £16.99 (pbk).As John Anderton stands 'in front of a cracked mirror' (Dick Minority 85), he hears the radio blaring from another room. It's an announcement that 'the prophylactic pre-detection of criminals through the ingenious use of mutant precogs' (84) - otherwise known as the 'Precrime system' - has identified the fugitive Anderton as a (probable) murderer. The certainty of the mutants' prediction is that a computer systematically compares and correlates their visions. Since 'unanimity of all three precogs is a hoped-for but seldom-achieved phenomena', the computer collates the opinion of the majority pair and produces 'a minority report of some slight variation, usually with reference to time and place, of the third mutant' (85).In Anderton's case, the minority report is a 'misphased' (89) or meta-vision, a reflection, as through a cracked mirror, of the majority report; this minority report changes the future, since it takes into account the fact that Anderton is notified by the original report of the pending murder: 'a new time-path had been created' rendering the original majority report 'obsolete' (88). But so too does the minority report create another (101), and Anderton eventually manifests his innocence by himself issuing another report - choosing to kill the story's villain, someone who sought to enslave the entire planet Earth. As a punishment (or reward, depending on one's view), Anderton is exiled to the off-world colonies, where his ignominy (or his heroism) will be neither vilified nor praised - just utterly forgotten.Taken from the story 'The Minority Report' (1956), here is an indirect allegory of the adaptation of Philip K. Dick's fiction by industrial cinema. An original text, all the more significant because it captures a minority view, a heterogeneous vision of the future, is rendered obsolete, then refracted as through a cracked mirror, which gives rise to a never-ending spiral of dissenting reviews and interpretations, where that series of discursive disputes sends the prophetic source into exile (or benign neglect, depending on one's view). Dick's original text becomes, ironically, the minority report that disputes the Hollywood adaptation, but it is exiled, by neglect, into heroic ignominy or ignominious heroism. Complications, convolutions and conditional parentheticals abound. Very phildickian, that.1Ever since the appearance of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (US/Singapore 1982), whose genetic ancestor is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Hollywood has shown considerable interest in mining Dick's work for estranging and estranged ideas, which it then immediately subordinates to the system of homogenisation that still marks the Hollywood ideal.2 This tendency is revealed, perfectly I think, in the DVD extra 'Minority Report from Story to Screen'. That story isn't Dick's 'The Minority Report' but instead the story of how Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg came to work together, their mutual enthusiasm based in mutual respect: two Hollywood giants, so to speak, cranking 888, the Penfield Mood Organ's number for 'the desire to watch TV, no matter what's on' (Dick Androids 4).There are now nine films from Dick's work - Blade Runner, Total Recall (Verhoeven US 1990), Confessions d'un Barjo (Boivin France 1992), Screamers (Duguay Canada/US/Japan 1996), Impostor (Fleder US 2002), Minority Report (Spielberg US 2002), Paycheck (Woo US/Canada 2003), A Scanner Darkly (Linklater US 2006) and Next (Tamahori US 2007). Scott's film alone has had almost as many manifestations - a US theatrical release, an international release, a circulating 'working cut', a pan-and-scan version for broadcast TV and video cassette, a Criterion analogue laser disc (wide-screen, but with the bottom ten per cent of the image cropped), a so-called 'Director's cut', an uncirculated forty-seven-minute remix by Charles de Lauzirika and a final cut, let's sincerely hope, called The Final Cut (2007), which ran in limited release before being embalmed with others for the 2007 DVD packages. …

When Science Fiction Writers Used Fictional Drugs: Rise and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Drug Dystopia

AbstractThis article compares seven novels published from 1932 to 1980 which are set in drug dystopias (near future societies where pharmacology produces or reinforces a dystopian social order) in order to answer two questions. What are the effects and symbolic meanings of the fictional drugs they describe? Why are there so few examples of this subgenre? Today, their warnings about the reduction of populations to docility or of assaults on the integrity of individual minds seem overwrought, and the apparent passing of the subgenre need not be mourned. Two of the seven novels, however, Brave New World and A Scanner Darkly, continue to be read because they warn against more subtle forms of tyranny.

When Science Fiction Writers Used Fictional Drugs: Rise and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Drug Dystopia

Abstract This article compares seven novels published from 1932 to 1980 which are set in drug dystopias (near future societies where pharmacology produces or reinforces a dystopian social order) in order to answer two questions. What are the effects and symbolic meanings of the fictional drugs they describe? Why are there so few examples of this subgenre? Today, their warnings about the reduction of populations to docility or of assaults on the integrity of individual minds seem overwrought, and the apparent passing of the subgenre need not be mourned. Two of the seven novels, however, Brave New World and A Scanner Darkly, continue to be read because they warn against more subtle forms of tyranny.