Tabula Rasa

This is rather beautiful and thought provoking. An android, alone on a desert planet, comes across a piece of vegetation which has, somehow, rooted in the arid wasteland. Determined to secure the plant’s future the android goes to great lengths to assist its success.

I can’t quite believe that this sophisticated and beautiful looking piece of animation is a student film.  It was created by the very talented Arnoldas Vitkus, who describes himself as a one man CGI army, for his final graduation piece at high school (which he does not name).

In computer science, tabula rasa refers to the development of autonomous agents which are provided with a mechanism to reason and plan toward their goal, but no built-in knowledge-base of their environment. They are thus truly a blank slate.

Perhaps this proves, finally, that it isn’t electric sheep, after all!