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I'm a designer in Vancouver, Canada. I work at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, am a director of the 221A Artist Run Centre, and a member of Fieldwork design collective. I'm an Emily Carr and University of Victoria graduate and have worked in the Philippines, Indonesia and the Netherlands. I'm a cycling advocate and race on the Garneau Evolution team.

design film industrial Film In the News, March 13, 2004 9:30 PM 1 comments

Robot, Our Friend

Could it happen in my lifetime, my own robot? In grade about 2 my friend Denis had that one from Radio Shack, Omnibot. Programmed with magnetic audio tapes and could carry a drink. I was very jealous.

I picture future history textbooks on the rise of robotic-human culture, and it seems to detail a first chapter with of course our 20th C. pop culture fascination with the topic, much thank you Asimov. And see now recent 21st C. robot culture: Animatrix, AI, Ghost in the Shell 2 was just released in Japan. Tamaguchis. And again Asimov, see Hollywood has now adapted I, Robot for the screen. Staring The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Of interest here is I, Robot's initial marketing campaign: trailers, promos and web site as faux advertisements for actual domestic robots, from specs to customized orders, Corbis-like stock photography, never pulling its tongue from its cheek, even tying the film's release date in as the "product" release date.

Chapter Two will then detail this shift from fantasy, from fiction, to the industrial and commercial/domestic domains. Mars rovers. The Pentagon is always looking for new warbots. Unmanned spy planes are brought down in Iraq. Know one told me unmanned spy planes were SOP in the military. Robot culture, which we've been so fascinated with for generations, is popping up in our reality in a rapid and wide-spread manner.

Of course we already have robot vacuum cleaners and dogs, but seems a lot of news stories lately on the more pre-production but full-scaled models being paraded in Japan by Toyota, by Honda and its Asimo, etc.

The key players in this initial shift seem to be the automotive industry. And why is that? Likely they already play a large part in the field's R&D, i.e. assembly line manufacturing. And these companies certainly produce more than just cars, from motorcycles, to generators, military equipment, to heavy industry machines. Picturing hydraulics, alloys, advanced computer control and slick industrial design models together helps me draw an natural connection between automakers and robots.

And so but now, with real robots coming (and like many appendixes and footnotes and like web sites full of the commercially-laughable forays into the field, i.e. probably all the robots from the 20th C.) what's the next direction for depiction of robots in film and lit?