Hero - by Dave Sag
This image pair shows the same optimistic future city before and after a Photobots simulation. The Original presents a clean, highly ordered vision of green technology, public spaces and robotics, while the Patina reveals the subtle physical traces left behind as the photobots interacted with the world over time.
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Original
A lush park stretches towards a modern skyline, with the Sydney Opera House beside a broad expanse of water. Elevated trains, wind turbines, drones and solar panels reinforce the futuristic setting. Families gather on the lawns, people ride in multi-legged robotic vehicles, and a humanoid robot tends raised vegetable beds beside neatly stocked produce shelves. The scene is bright, colourful and carefully maintained.
Patina
The overall composition remains unchanged, but the image is now scattered with pale, translucent marks that drift across the sky, trees, buildings, water and foreground. These looping and curling traces vary in size and direction, creating a delicate layer of accumulated surface markings. The original subjects remain clearly visible beneath the patina, while the surviving Photobots themselves are absent from the capture.
What changed
The photobots have added a scatter of biological-looking traces across the image surface. Some marks resemble tiny loops or spirals, while others form longer wandering paths, giving the impression that many independent organisms have moved through different parts of the world over time. The result feels less pristine than the Original, replacing perfect cleanliness with the kind of subtle wear that living activity can leave behind.
This Patina records the lasting changes made to the world image, together with the bodies of Photobots that did not survive, after seven and a half simulated minutes in which a population of 500 bots declined to 49 survivors. There were no recorded births during the run that produced the patina.
Details
Gallery material is curated and intended for a general audience.
- Iteration
- 987
- Elapsed in iteration
- 455 s
- Seeded into iteration
- 500
- Matured through capture
- 379
- Born through capture
- 0
- Dead through capture
- 451
- Alive at capture
- 49
- Deepest living biological generation
- 0