Annem / The Voight-Kampff Test

This was a gift for my mom on mother’s day.

Annem means “My Mother” in Turkish. The Voight-Kampff test is an examination technique from the movie Blade Runner, and of course Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which Blade Runner was adapted from. It’s used by the LAPD to determine whether a person is a human or a replicant (android). It asks emotionally provocative questions and measures bodily responses such as respiration, pupillary dilation, heart rate, etc. Replicants can’t mimic such involuntary reflexes.

This song is my emotional reaction to one of the questions. It’s up to you to decide if I’m human or replicant. In the opening scene of Blade Runner below, the hiding replicant on the verge of being caught gives a much more drastic response to the same question.

The Turkish sentence I yell at the end is one I shouted at my mother from my room countless times throughout my teenage years, whenever she was about to go grocery shopping. It translates as “Moooom, can you buy some Coke, too?”. But like the “As you wish” of Princess Bride, here it means something else entirely. It means I love you.