Enter the Humanoids
Marco Spier crossed the Atlantic to find a computer the size of a fridge, joined the creative hothouse of 1990s MTV, and has spent 25 years at Psyop smashing together art and technology for everyone from Coca-Cola to Apple. Now he’s created five future humans who hunt Vollebak jackets across space and time.
In 1994 Marco Spier left Berlin for New York because he wanted to work with a computer, a very particular computer. Silicon Graphics, Inc had shrunk the size and cost of the technology needed to create super-detailed 3D effects and animation. And their machines, the engines driving audience-pulling CGI, were transforming filmmaking. Spielberg had used SGI machines to conjure dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the SGI IRIS Crimson made a cameo in the movie. SGI’s technology had been first adopted though by industrial designers to create detailed 3D visualisations, virtual prototypes. Spier had studied industrial design at Berlin’s HdK (now Berlin University of the Arts). And even though he’d never used an SGI machine, he knew what they could do. And had ideas about how to use them. Getting access to one was the problem. As Spier says, SGI’s machines were still hugely expensive and the size of a fridge. There weren’t many of them around. He did some digging and found out there were just two in New York. And MTV had one of them. Landed in New York, he managed to arrange a meeting. “MTV had just bought this computer, but they didn’t know what to do with it,” Spier says. “I told them I did. I could create art with it.”
“MTV had just bought this computer, but they didn’t know what to do with it,” Spier says. “I told them I did. I could create art with it.”
MTV took Spier on but now he had to make good on his promise. “There was no school for CGI,” he says. “There were books and I read everything about the software in two days, just soaking it in. And pressing buttons to see what happens. When you’re in your twenties and you’ve told everyone you can do it, you make it happen.” He was soon charged with creating a new identity for MTV News and delivered. MTV had launched a decade and a half earlier and made music videos a commercial necessity for record companies. Its Digital Television Laboratory became an experimental sandpit for young filmmakers and animators. In the late 1990s, it was the perfect place to be young, creative and tech savvy. The channel had a lot of airtime to fill and ran on raw nerve, innovative tech and quick-turnaround creativity. “They’d say: we need a promo, make something cool with the computer, and we’ll put it on air tomorrow,” he remembers. “Sometimes it wasn’t finished rendering and they’d put it on air anyway.” Spier loved it. “We learned how to make things people like, and we really enjoyed it.”
Let's make some cool shit
By his own admission, Spier was a shy kid and a loner. He lost himself in drawing and craft but was also good at maths. At 12 he was making his own furniture. “I always wanted to create something that had some use to it. It wasn’t sculpting or painting.” Industrial design seemed the obvious path. But while studying, Spier became as interested in selling what he was designing and making, or communicating its use and value, as the thing itself. He also discovered computers and how you could use them to create films and visual effects. “I put together these really elaborate presentations for my projects,” he says. “I really wanted to make people feel what the product was doing. Designing the product itself became kind of irrelevant.” By 2000, Spier was ready to use what he had learned at MTV in different ways. He joined forces with four MTV friends and colleagues and formed Psyop, a scrappy, commercial art collective set on upending the assembly-line model that split design, animation and live action into separate companies. Their founding mission, as Spier puts it, was simple. “Let’s make some cool shit.”
Psyop’s promise was and is “art, story and technology, pushed to the edge”. And they use software in ways it isn’t meant to be used.
Psyop’s promise was and is “art, story and technology, pushed to the edge”. And they use software in ways it isn’t meant to be used. “We cracked open the process and used the computers to do things that hadn’t been possible,” Spier says. Designers, artists and even architects wrote in asking to come on board. They were quickly tagged ‘the Pixar of advertising’. But Psyop have never really made adverts. It creates new realities, a gleaming machine-utopia inside a Coca-Cola bottle (a campaign that spawned sequels, online games and physical toys), slow-motion, pencil-drawn crowds for Adidas, painterly gloom in a video-game prequel. “In terms of commercials production, Psyop have always been outliers,” says Bruce McKelvie, Vollebak’s head of film. “They have always been much cooler than anybody else.”
“In terms of commercials production, Psyop have always been outliers,” says Bruce McKelvie, Vollebak’s head of film. “They have always been much cooler than anybody else.”
Future humxns
The Covid pandemic chilled the advertising business and even Psyop felt it. With time on his hands, Spier started to play. “We always make art to fill the time when we’re not making ads,” he says. There were strange, new worlds to build and he had time to build them. At the same time, digital art was having a moment. The big galleries and auction houses were dispensing cash and credibility. Psyop is made up of artists that also consider themselves technologists and now computer-generated art was being taken seriously. Meanwhile, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, were promising a way around the art world’s traditional gatekeepers and financial middlemen. Digital avatars, bought and traded as NFTs, were the new high-value collectible. Spier, still alert to disruptive creative technology, saw possibilities. Psyop had already worked with gaming technology and were close to Epic, the gaming tech giant that built the Unreal game engine. They were given an early preview of Epic’s MetaHuman tool, a cloud-based configurator that allowed users to create almost human-looking digital avatars.
“This is cool,” Spier thought, “but it can be way cooler.” The MetaHumans were convincing but still a little off. Spier saw potential in their artificiality and otherworldliness. “We wanted to take that uncanny-valley feeling and push it even harder. We cracked it open.” Spier and his fellow Psyop director Shane Griffin used the MetaHuman platform to create a new, distinct digital world for the “humans of the future”. They called it HUMXN. Users could create avatars with brightly coloured metallic skin and eyes pretty much any colour they fancied. It was complex speculative design, a vision of the human race gone interplanetary. There were questions deliberately left unanswered. “Are they cyborgs? Are they artificial? Are they still human? Have they manipulated their DNA to live in different climates and atmospheres?” Each character could be tokenised and owned for life, “your digital identity, your footprint,” Spier says. “It was very design-driven, fashion-oriented,” he adds. Epic liked it enough to invite them to present at its London lab, to a room full of fashionable people. HUMXN had real potential. Pretty quickly though, the NFT bubble burst and people lost interest in owning their own platform-hopping avatars. A far more substantial and transformative technology was about to break through. The idea of a portable digital identity suddenly felt beside the point and there were way more interesting possibilities to play with. “What if we could connect an AI to the characters and make them autonomous?” Spier says. “We could actually bring characters to life, create personalities. We could build characters you can have a dialogue with.” The instinct was sharpened by a year-long collaboration with Microsoft, which hired Psyop to design an on-screen character for its Copilot AI assistant. And that’s where we enter the picture, sideways.
“What if we could connect an AI to the characters and make them autonomous?” Spier says. “We could actually bring characters to life, create personalities. We could build characters you can have a dialogue with.”
Art and Technology
“We wanted to experiment with digitally rendered textures,” says McKelvie. And Spier and Psyop seemed like good potential partners. AI-powered future humans weren’t, at that point, on the agenda. For Spier though, the brief presented the perfect opportunity to push further with the HUMXN platform. “When I looked at Vollebak, my mind instantly went to this HUMXN art project,” he says. “It was the perfect merger between technology and art.”
“When I looked at Vollebak, my mind instantly went to this HUMXN art project,” he says. “It was the perfect merger between technology and art.”
Spier and his team suggested an evolutionary leap for the HUMXN future human avatars, more precisely rendered and convincing. And Spier came up with a concept. He would create a consortium of Vollebak collectors from the far future, some using nefarious means to get hold of their prizes. “In my mind they’re hunters for vintage artefacts,” he says. “There’s a ranking system, and they’re constantly chasing through the universe to find them. They’re like Indiana Jones from the future.” He created a complex backstory and bios for what became the Humanoids. There is the obsessive, hoarding climate-era thermal prototypes; the consortium leader in a Full Metal Jacket who collects copper and tracks how it oxidises over centuries; the curator who logs a million Sashiko stitches; and the surveillance obsessive keeping a working iPhone 30 sealed in the Faraday pocket of a Shielding Bomber. There is an economy, rankings, auctions, ‘qualia density’ measured per square centimetre, snobbery about provenance, rival collectors on Sirius B. We were on board.
“In my mind they’re hunters for vintage artefacts,” he says. “There’s a ranking system, and they’re constantly chasing through the universe to find them. They’re like Indiana Jones from the future.”
Digital Tailoring
Spier built our five Humanoids in Unreal, which means they live and breathe in real time. There are no pre-rendered frames, and every movement is generated on the fly, the way a game responds the instant you press a button. But using the Unreal engine created the biggest challenge of the project. Rendering believable digital material in real time is still a serious test of software tailoring. “It’s a very complex calculation for the computer to understand,” says Spier. “Working out how the material flows, is there wind, how does it wrinkle when you lift your arm. And it has to make those calculations in microseconds.” The process was something like IRL tailoring. “You take the pattern, the blueprint of the jacket, and the software stitches it together the same way the real garment is stitched,” Spier says. “Then you rig it to the character and make sure it fits.” Then came the notes any tailor would recognise. “Should it be baggier or longer? Is it sitting the right way?” It took six weeks of work, modelling mostly from photographs as well as the real pieces. “It’s one thing getting the texture 85% accurate,” says McKelvie. “It’s another to get the drape and fit exactly right. And getting it to move properly is a whole world of pain.”
Using the Unreal engine created the biggest challenge of the project. Rendering believable digital material in real time is still a serious test of software tailoring.
For the first public appearances of the Humanoids, on screens big and small, we have created scripts for them to read, building on Spier’s original concept. But they will become AI-driven autonomous beings, living out their virtual lives in a far-off future, continuing their hunt for Vollebak ‘artefacts’. We can brief them on new product launches, which they relocate in their universe. And then let them create and tell new stories. Spier imagines the Humanoids as a sci-fi, interactive evolution of the giant Bill Viola video installations he loves: vast, slow-moving, strange super-detailed humans. With the twist that you will be able to interrogate them about a jacket they have snatched or snaffled from a rogue droid on the disputed Sirius B annex.
They will become AI-driven autonomous beings, living out their virtual lives in a far-off future, continuing their hunt for Vollebak ‘artefacts’.
What's real
For Spier, the Humanoids are also a test case for how Psyop integrate AI into their wider world building. “We’re really good at creating worlds and characters,” he says. “That ability to bring them to life is what’s fascinating.” He’s less convinced about other AI use cases. Spier is a maker and collaborator before he is a try-anything tech evangelist. And AI image-generation leaves him largely cold. “Generating something with AI is a very lonely, very frustrating process. You describe what you want over and over, and after a thousand versions you settle for something not quite what you envisioned.” Where he sees real value is at the edges, AI as a visual-effects assistant. “Simulating water or coffee spilling is super complex, but an AI can do that,” he says. It can supercharge rotoscoping, tracing line drawings over live-action footage frame-by-frame. And he does see AI’s worth in the hands of artists who bend it toward something genuinely new, rather than pulling the slot-machine lever and coming up with reheated seconds.
For Spier, the Humanoids are also a test case for how Psyop integrate AI into their wider world building. “We’re really good at creating worlds and characters,” he says. “That ability to bring them to life is what’s fascinating.” He’s less convinced about other AI use cases.
But automating first steps, he argues, is a creativity killer. “A lot of people are using AI to create storyboards” he says. “But the process of sitting with a storyboard artist, talking about angles, the story arc, how everything connects, automating that doesn’t work. You’re not creating, you’re not breaking everything down to be exactly what and where you want it to be.” And this kind of craft and creativity, he suspects, is about to become more valuable, not less. “We appreciate how a thing was made, not just the outcome. I can see a future where that becomes very important.” He thinks about his four-year-old son, part of the first generation who will never know a world without AI. “That generation will have a strong instinct for what’s real,” he says. “They’ll seek out things that are genuinely human.” We like to think there is still a lot of the genuinely human in the Humanoids, the craft, care and quirks, the humour and sideways thinking that are still our prerogative. But we have always taken the view that the future is not to be feared but run at. And Spier – the student who once crossed an ocean for a computer – has spent 25 years doing exactly that, bringing the newest tools to the oldest crafts to make things that weren’t possible the day before.