Concept
Mission ASS2ROID started with a bicep curl and a bad joke and got a life of its own.
The project evolved into a chaotic sci-fi universe complete with cinematic trailer, a rover roid bar, an ad campaign, and a guidebook.
ASS2ROID is a theme camp for The Borderland, a co-created festival following the Burning Man 10+1 principles. The premise: two prospectors are running a full mining operation on the fictional asteroid Korova Rock. Everything that follows is built from that premise outward, with total sincerity and absolutely no restraint. Imagine The Fifth Element if Luc Besson had made slightly worse decisions, which would have made it considerably better.
The project began as a collaborative creative exercise (while lifting heavy) between two people who watched Blade Runner at an impressionable age and never fully recovered. Combining a shared love of sci-fi franchises and 1980s comics, we went all-in with bleached blonde hair to the tunes of a soundtrack with over 100 songs.
Cinematic trailer
Visual Direction
Pulpy, hand-made, easter eggs
The visual language draws from 1980s comic book artists, Richard Corben and Moebius in particular. The trailer came first: Borderland runs a pre-festival crowdfunding round where projects pitch for community votes and funding, and ASS2ROID needed to earn its place. The deliberate choice was to use AI tools (Midjourney, ElevenLabs) to achieve a hand-crafted, pulpy aesthetic rather than the smooth, clean output AI usually produces. Every frame of the trailer and every poster element should feel like it belongs to an alternate comic book universe.
we have milk+. we don't drink it for the taste.
The fictional publisher "Kroeber Institute" lends institutional legitimacy to the lore. The Latin mission motto in profundum imis ("we go deep") is stitched onto the mission emblem with full seriousness. Fans of Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary will recognise Rocky as a recurring character. Everyone else is encouraged to read the book immediately.
The authors are named after prominent figures in science fiction. It is entirely possible this whole thing is also an elaborate application to an academic world that keeps moving the goalposts.
Field Notes
Field research confirms what the Institute long suspected. Preliminary findings suggest the inhabitants of Korova Rock developed several sacred rites around the extraction and consumption of mineral compounds. The evidence is fragmentary but compelling. We are choosing to interpret it as compelling.
Click images to expand
Graphic Design
Two fonts. One pivot.
The initial visual direction leaned retrofuturistic with clean geometry — led by Lucidity Condensed, the kind of type that says space program rather than asteroid crime. Halfway through the project, that font didn't cut it. ASS2ROID had, if possible, grown into a mildly unhinged beast that needed something faster, something that could match its wildly ironic sex appeal.
The switch was to a grittier register: cyber grunge and Y2K aesthetics with a nod to Y3K and other influences from the algos, digital letterforms and a pinch of the visual grammar of something photocopied one too many times or printed on a dot-matrix printer in a truck stop on the edge of the solar system. The type needed to feel used. Like it had been somewhere, yet just woke up from a very long beauty sleep in a cryo pod with no connection to vintage glamour. Enter Was Gayji NP, Was Don Chedi, and Reesha.
The final typographic palette carries that tension, hopefully institutional enough to hold the Kroeber Institute fiction together yet rough enough that you'd believe it was produced under pressure, in bad lighting, by people who hadn't slept. We call that Tuesday.
The Physical Build
Analogue art car
The physical iteration of the ASS2ROID concept is a kit-bashed and heavily retrofitted garden cart transformed into a roid rover bar — an analogue art car, if you will. We haunted secondhand stores for old game consoles, VHS tapes, and trinkets, then added warning tape, floodlights, custom tubing, a speaker, and a converted lampshade-turned-parabola. The rover runs on a dashing two-leg drive and carries supplement jars, protein shaker cups, water jugs, and compartments for stickers and hockey cards (our version of reading the tarot).
We were contacted by the DMV (Department of Muddy Vehicles) with inquiries about operating an unregistered vehicle on the grounds. We of course complied. The rover was submitted for inspection and approval at the designated mutant vehicle station. Safety third.
And yes, that is indeed a framed photo of the one and only Dolph Lundgren.
The finished rover bar, living the craterous dream through a little AI augmentation.
The ad campaign, specially designed to be placed in every portapotty cluster on the playa. Click to inspect.
Origin Story
On building things for yourself
This project was born in the spring of a difficult year. Job applications were disappearing into silence, AI tools felt as overwhelming as everything else, and building a portfolio felt like joining Sisyphos on his morning workout.
That spring had taken more out of me than I expected, and somewhere in the middle of it my partner and I started planning our summer: the highlight of the year was going to be a regional burn we've frequented for years followed by a return to the mountains of northern Sweden. I was far away from feeling excited about any of it. What I needed, it turned out, was a project with no client, no rules, no permission required. Something completely ridiculous.
The project became a crash course in tools I'd been circling nervously, such as Midjourney, ElevenLabs, and motion editing, alongside the Adobe suite and a Canva account that finally earned its subscription. More than the skills, though, ASS2ROID reminded me what I actually love doing: pulling cultural references and visual symbols into a new language, building narrative arcs, and making worlds out of almost nothing.
ASS2ROID ended up being a creative pressure valve during a period of professional uncertainty. We don't need to get into the number of moodboards I made.
