Skip to main content

Watch the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” Music Video Re-Enacted by Robots

When Microsoft released Windows 95, they didn’t skimp on the publicity. Their promotional campaign for the operating system even included television spots soundtracked with the Rolling Stones’ hit “Start Me Up.” The lyrics of its chorus neatly suited the product, which came with a re-engineered interface featuring a then-novel feature called the Start menu. Though hardly new even then, the song did also carry faint associations with innovation, having originally been released on August 14, 1981, just two weeks after the launch of a cable channel called MTV. Its music video thus received a great deal of airplay, proving to the public that the Stones could stay on the cutting edge.

By the 1980s, relevance was by no means guaranteed to any band formed in the 1960s. More than proven though the point may be today, the Michael Lindsay-Hogg-directed music video for “Start Me Up” demonstrated that even a group of rockers in or near their forties could perform with the same uncontainable vitality they always had.

Even now, forty years after that, the group’s surviving members show no inclination to retire, and the highest technology has only just begun to catch up to them. I refer, of course, to Spot, the model of robot dog previously seen here on Open Culture moonwalking and twerking to Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk.” In the years since then, it seems he’s learned to move like Jagger — as well as Richards, Wyman, Wood, and Watts.

In “Spot Me Up,” four Spot models together replicate about a minute of the “Start Me Up” video. That each robot really does seem to convey traces of the personality of its particular Stone — even the one tasked with replicating a glance from the late Charlie Watts, a force of subtlety behind the drum kit for more than half a century — speaks to the engineering skill marshaled by Boston Dynamics, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff where Spot was invented. Not everyone has warmed to the lifelike movements of their robots, a lineup that also includes the formidable humanoid Atlas. But dance videos like these serve as a form of public relations for its products, which were designed for not the stage but factories, mines, and power plants — places where they can do what any fan of the Stones in the 80s would surely call the dirty work.

Related Content:

Keith Richards Demonstrates His Famous 5-String Technique (Used on Classic Stones Songs Like “Start Me Up,” “Honky Tonk Women” & More

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Distancing in Quarantine

The Rolling Stones Release a Timely Track, “Living in a Ghost Town”: Their First New Music in Eight Years

The Robots of Your Dystopian Future Are Already Here: Two Chilling Videos Drive It All Home

Twerking, Moonwalking AI Robots — They’re Now Here

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Performed by German First Graders in Adorable Cardboard Robot Outfits

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Watch the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” Music Video Re-Enacted by Robots is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3EwaQWf
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cultivate Our Garden”: An Animated Introduction

“Voltaire’s goal in writing [his 1759 satire Candide ] was to destroy the optimism of his times,” says Alain de Botton in the School of Life video above, “an optimism that centered around science, love, technical progress, and a faith in reason.” These beliefs were folly, Voltaire thought: the transfer of faith from a providential God to a perfect, clockwork universe. Candide satirizes this happy rationalism in Doctor Pangloss, whose belief that ours is the best of possible worlds comes directly from the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Leibniz . The preponderance of the evidence, Voltaire made abundantly clear in the novel’s series of increasingly horrific episodes, points toward a blind, indifferent universe full of needless cruelty and chaos. “Hope was, he felt, a disease,” de Botton says, and “it was Voltaire’s generous goal to try and cure us of it.” But as everyone who has read Candide (or read a summary or brief notes on Candide ) knows, the novel does not end with ...
Post a Comment
Read more

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more