Mission ASS2ROID started with a bicep curl and a bad joke. My partner and I were at the gym, lifting heavy and riffing on the sci-fi franchises and 80s comics we grew up loving. We created two prospectors running a mining operation on a fictive asteroid called Korova Rock. The Borderland is a co-created festival, and we wanted to bring a fully realized world, complete with a lore-dense, easter-egg-filled alternate universe.

I took the opportunity to play, and learn, with different AI tools. I knew from the start that I didn’t want to generate polished, airbrushed imagery but to recreate the aesthetic of the comic book aesthetic I love (Richard Corben's visceral, pulpy figures and Moebius's vast, strange landscapes to name two.) The tools became a collaborator in building a visual language that felt hand-made and world-worn rather than algorithmically smooth.

What we've built so far: a cinematic trailer (comic book style, visuals and sound both AI-generated, cut for YouTube and IG Reels), a movie poster, two ad campaigns riffing on 1980’s and 1990’s visual culture, an official guidebook for Korova Rock published by the fictional Kroeber Institute (a loving nod to Ursula K. Le Guin), a menu concept complete with items like Milk+ and a secret menu, stickers with one-liners, a mission emblem with our motto in latin (in profundum imis), a comic strip, and a physical rover roid bar on a garden cart built out with old game consoles, tubing, a massive speaker, and customized zip lock bags. The soundtrack is all bangers from the 1980s. Obviously.