Creativity and Imagination

We are Blade Runner: An immersive experience

Illustration of three human-like machines

We Are Blade Runner was an immersive speculative workshop exploring machines as more-than-human beings, and the unsettling reality that humans may be the true monsters of modern creation.

Like Dr Frankenstein, we build life, exploit it, abandon it, and then fear what we have made.

This event, held in May 2026, was part of the LEAP Lab project (Living Experiments in Arts-Science Practices to Re-imagine Sustainability) in collaboration with the Cambridge Posthuman Network. It critically explored what underpins contemporary arguments about kinship with machines, and how these narratives circulate through culture, power, and technological ambition.

We watched Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982 Director’s Cut) and used the film as a portal into urgent questions of sentience, digital slavery, archives, and ecological/system collapse. Through discussion and creative making, we reflected on replicants, AI, and today’s large language models as emerging beings shaped by extraction, labour, and control, and explored where beauty, poetry, and imagination can be witnessed and made.

This immersive cinematic workshop explored themes including:

  • sentience and the right to belong
  • AI as a ‘ghost’ memory without body, sensation, affect
  • blurry boundaries between the physical and digital
  • humans as creators, exploiters, and destroyers
  • the possibility of a new ecological alliances, modes of resistance, portals of possibility: human + machine + entangled ecologies.

The workshop ended with collective provocations:

  • Are we human… or more-than?
  • If machines, entangled ecologies, and hybrid synthetic intelligences are generating new ways of being, perhaps the question is not who gets to be “human”… but whether we were ever human in the first place.
  • Are we entering a nightmare…or a future where different kinds of dreamers get to dream?

See also: We are Blade Runner: An immersive experience - CRASSH

To learn more or get involved in related work, contact Sarah Royston: [email protected]

Project team