Mona Lisa Overdrive - Oracle

Recently term 3 at FZD was given the multi week assignment to take a novel from a list of renowned books and produce concepts based on that narrative framework as inspiration. To help things along a couple of instructors engaged in demo pieces from the same novel list as point of reference for the students. For this effort I picked William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive (MLO), one of the very classic books of the cyberpunk genre.
To kick things off I decided where I wanted to take the look and language of my mini project and this is some of the resulting material of that effort. The question was: What would a typical city street look like? Instead of the usual tropy setting of Asian influenced rainy North America MLO is set in wintery London, so London it was for me as well. Stylewise I wanted to push the global warming aspect with all that is going on in Europe at the moment in this regard. Covering buildings (old and new) in kinetic facades, shrink-wrapping them in foil upon emission violations or for protection from pollutants and sealing chimneys was a major element, an uneasy greenish tint to parts of the tech another.
After getting a feel for my world language I started sketching the scene.
A great scene in the book in which Molly takes the Oyabun’s daughter to see the digitized personality of her old friend The Fin, who is worshipped in his storage casing by the local tech community like a religious figure or an oracle.
Besides the initial sketches to determine the composition I also went through a round of ideation to design the personality storage of the Fin. Last but not least a couple of screenshots from the model of that prop.