I could be accused of a robot fascination. I’m solid on Asimov’s 3 Rules (and have a shirt that illustrates them for the benefit of anyone nearby concerned about breakaway robot behavior), created 2 robot related Twitter lists, doodle robots all over my desk then make animations centered around them, put two on stage as officers in a far future Comedy Of Errors and own at least half a dozen t-shirts with a score of robots printed on them.
And yet, I still dream of Dream Bot. Dream Bot with its whimsical drift across an aqua blue cloud spotted sky. Dream Bot with its posture of patience, its oddly quizzical expression and its limbs crazily patched with crosshatched strips of sky. Inner-Monster has managed to create a unique robot character who you wouldn’t be surprised to have turn up on your horizon. Dream Bot looks like it belongs there, just right of the puffy bat cloud. The shirt does an excellent job of evoking what I think of as a calm, breezy afternoon picnic mood.
I see Dream Bot and I don’t see robot. I see lying on your back in a park, making stories out of clouds, with a perfect sky above. Or perhaps, unfolding your skyscraper long limbs to skim impossibly through the clouds at jet level. But something simultaneously serene and exhilarating.
And why is Dream Bot my El Dorado, you ask. Why do I only dream of it? Why didn’t it join the other robot designs I own? I wasn’t sure about the aqua or the nearly total domination of the shirt by the design. It was early in my steps away from centered chest images. I drifted, like the clouds. Vanity. How would I look in the shirt? It wouldn’t have mattered to Dream Bot. And it shouldn’t have mattered to me. Dream Bot would have drifted easily through aqua sky and doubt, I would have occasionally been heard singing phrases from Ocean Blue’s “Drifting, Falling” and we would have been calm together, Dream Bot and I, dreaming whimsical drifting crazily crosshatched dreams.
