Cosmopolitan Cyborg Explained

Given the goal of creating an entertaining and cutting edge new station identity campaign for the Italian music network All Music, two words stood out as key concepts:

Cyborg

A human who has certain physiological processes aided
or controlled by mechanical or electronic devices.

Cosmopolitan

1. Pertinent or common to the whole world.
2. Having constituent elements from all over the world or from many different parts of the world.

Young people today are more connected to new technologies than ever before. Computers, mobile phones, and mp3 players are just some of the array of gadgets that define the aesthetics of the contemporary youth culture. Today’s young person can be viewed as a cyborg, as many processes which were formerly time consuming real world events are now done virtually with the click of a button.

Globalization has accelerated the mixing and mashing of cultures, producing hybrid forms of art and music. Today’s young person is connected through the internet to large networks of creative influence from all over the world, with an identity that is as digital as it is cosmopolitan.

To express these aspects of the contemporary digital landscape, I proposed to create a personality emblematic of these qualities his/herself: the Cosmopolitan Cyborg. He/she is a hypercubist composite personality made up of the faces and voices of the All Music network’s own VJs. Using only original sounds recorded with the human voice, elaborate yet recognizable genres of contemporary music are synthesized. The result is a concrete answer to the tired world of lip-sync found in music videos. I call it videomusic.

The payoff, which translates to: “All Music, a republic founded on music”, as spoken from the mouth of the Cosmopolitan Cyborg, reads as an intriguing commentary on contemporary Italian music culture, simultaneously conscious of the past and yet boldly jumping into the future of digital aesthetics.

In the future I hope to be able to work with musicians, bands and composers in this manner to create a new definition for music videos befitting our contemporary era of hypercubist aesthetics.