Backface Dreaming: Blade Runner

Backface Dreaming is the third and culminating practice artefact within Project Esper, building upon the concepts of Filmic Fascia and the Cinematic Backface to explore how unseen cinematic spaces might be speculatively extended through generative inference. Developed through Research through Creative Practice and Critical Making, the work investigates how contemporary AI systems can be mobilised not as tools of optimisation, but as instruments for surfacing new critical and aesthetic questions about cinema.

The project begins with the identification of gaps, voids and unresolved regions within respatialised cinematic environments. High-resolution stills extracted from existing films are introduced into generative AI workflows capable of producing alternative camera positions and adjacent viewpoints. Inspired by the speculative operation of the Esper machine in Blade Runner (1982), the process enables images to become navigable rather than fixed. Rather than enhancing or enlarging a frame, the system imagines what might exist beyond it, producing synthetic perspectives that extend the cinematic world beyond the limits of the original capture.

These generated views are subsequently reintroduced into Gaussian Splat reconstruction workflows, creating iterative cycles of inference and respatialisation. Through this process, synthetic data is used to stabilise and populate regions of the Cinematic Backface. The project refers to this iterative inferential process as Backface Dreaming: a form of machine-assisted imagining that deposits speculative spatial continuity into previously unresolved areas of the cinematic environment.

Importantly, Backface Dreaming does not claim to recover hidden truth or reconstruct an authentic original space. Instead, it foregrounds the role of imagination, extrapolation and inference in the production of spatial coherence. The resulting artefact functions as both a critical and creative intervention, revealing how cinematic worlds might persist beyond the frame while simultaneously exposing the speculative nature of their extension.

By coining the concept of Backface Dreaming, the project offers a new poetic vocabulary for discussing generative media and the respatialisation of cinema. The practice surfaces emerging research agendas around authorship, canonicity, intellectual property, narrative continuity and the future relationship between synthetic media, virtual production and cinematic worldbuilding.