Mar 18, 2009 04:27 PM
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By the time the first extraterrestrials arrived on Earth, they found only the ruins of human civilization. But the landscape, at least outside in the deserts, was beautiful. Want to see what else they found?
This is an extremely small sampling from the work of otaku artist Kenji Yanobe, who blends pop images from scifi with darkly satirical tales of an Earth whose future has been ruined. I'm particularly impressed by his Atom Suit Series, which the top image came from, and features a whole series of images where people in those orange suits are wandering through what's left of Earth trying to figure out what happened here.
One of Yanobe's ongoing obsessions is the exosuit, whether it's the Atom Suit or a "survival suit" or a "radiation suit." Or maybe just a giant pair of Godzilla legs that you strap onto your bottom half. Possibly he's influenced by Astro Boy. Or perhaps by Japan's long-running Gundam series, which features soldiers in mobile armor sort of like Iron Man's but even more elaborate. Or maybe he's just seen one too many images of people walking on the moon in those big puffy astronaut getups.
No matter what the cause, Yanobe is creating some of the weirdest and most bizarrely haunting images of what might happen in a post-human future.
Check out more of Yanobe's work on his website.
Send an email to Annalee Newitz, the author of this post, at annalee@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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