November 21, 2008
1stAveMachine Ads - Cyborgs Can be Atomized
High-end VFX production house, 1st Avenue Machine, has created some ads depicting robots and cyborgs as machines that can be atomized into similarly sized parts. As advertising often attempts to reflect simplistic notions of how society understands things, I wonder if this idea is coming in vogue regarding robots and cyborgs. This first sexy little piece was done for Saturn, a Best Buy-like electronics store in Europe:
Far less exciting, but specially interesting is 1stAveMachine’s ad for Adidas:
While definitely cool looking, both of these ads show a fairly strange notion of robots. Nope, no functional decomposition here - its all holographic interchangeable parts, folks. Anyone see this trope emerging anywhere else?
Comments
November 21, 2008
Ak!mbo said:
The “melting” holographic look reminds me of something I’ve seen in anime, but can’t quite put my finger on.
Definitely brings to mind some of the digital imagery in Shirow Masamune’s GitS 2 manga, but they are all “floating” graphics, they’re not parts of people, or robtos, in the same way.
November 22, 2008
johnkzin said:
It reminds me some of the Metalo concept in the Superman comics (especially during the death of superman part of the series), where he can incorporate various pieces of other machines into himself in a similar fashion to what you see in the soccer/football video. Or perhaps my impression of the girl cyborg in the 3rd Terminator movie (which I haven’t seen, just saying my impression of her from the previews, where she can incorporate bits of machines into her, but she did appear to have a core platform form which she builds, where the soccer player doesn’t appear to).
For the first video, I think it seems to gel quite well with concepts of nanites, only these are clearly larger than nano-scale pieces. But, the point is the same: you dont’ have to build your robots/androids/etc. from macro-scale components that resemble human bones, muscles, etc. They can be more like nanites that assemble into a macro-scale shape (think of the T2000 from the terminator stories). Or they can be something bigger than ninites that assemble into a cooperative arrangement (like the 2 videos here).
In either case, the “core” is perhaps virtual — like a cloud computer, the identity of the core is distributed across all pieces, so they are a collective instead of accessories. This fits well with a story I once read about a species of animal that do that, and end up incorporating a human at some point. The original story was called something like “Nimrod”, or “The Nimrod Experiment” or something, but was later re-written and given another title. Don’t recall it right now.
But, you just apply those same concepts in distributed computing to the pieces of the soccer player.
johnkzin said:
(just updating the “notify me” check box)
November 23, 2008
Klaw said:
Second one reminds me of the end credit graphics from Iron Man, with the exploding isometrics done of the ILM wireframe files.
November 26, 2008
Ak!mbo said:
You know, I thought that was the most enjoyable part of that whole movie..