Situation

Sandvik, a 161-year-old global manufacturing company was making a huge shift into digital manufacturing, but their heritage was working against them. They were still being considered a traditional engineering company, while their digital-tech forward competition thrived.

Brief

Our brief was to showcase Sandvik’s digital manufacturing expertise famous and to showcase it in a way that was engaging, relatable and respected by engineers the world over.

Objectives

Our goal with the campaign was to create fame for Sandvik and its digital manufacturing transformation. To do this, we needed to spark conversation about Sandvik across industries. We also wanted the activation to draw attention to Sandvik as a company that uses technology in ways that push the limits of human advancement. This way we could help them with yet another goal - to attract the next generation of digital talent.

Industrialisation 4.0 is changing the manufacturing world. Led by machine learning and generative AI, it is a complex transformation where the applications in planning, design, machining and verification are subjects far from the societal discourse and popular culture.

However, the discussion around the technologies themselves has reached a boiling point in culture. On one hand people are incredibly excited about the capabilities of generative AI. On the other hand, there is fierce debate whether generative AI has the capability to replace humans, by generating original creativity, or an even greater challenge: To generate art.

This cultural tension became our tinder, to create a larger discussion across industries – ‘Can AI create art as good as humanity’s best artists?’ To stimulate this debate, we took Sandvik’s digital manufacturing expertise to the world stage, through popular culture. Focusing on using Sandvik’s AI technology and our creativity, to bring together five sculptors from around the world. Sculptors that lived hundreds of years apart, with the purpose to form the ultimate collaboration.

This impossible collaboration became a focal point of debate in the art world. Countless conversations about if it is art or not emerged. Today, the statue, carved out of steel within 0.03 accuracy to the AI’s output, has become so much more than an exhibit in a national museum. It has become a symbol for the positive use of AI and a testament to Sandvik’s manufacturing technologies.

Communicating heavy machinery and digital solutions doesn’t make any impact. We needed to be distinct and surprising and tell a story powerful enough to break into mass culture.

We targeted an already sacred arena, the classical art world.

Using several generative AI, we analysed thousands of sculptures and created a model that resurrected five master sculptors who span three continents and 500 years. We then used AI to design their collaborative vision into one sculpture: Michelangelo’s dynamism, Rodin’s musculature, Käthe Kollwitz’s expressionism, Kotaro Takamura’s focus on momentum and Augusta Savage’s defiance, all in one impossible statue. Brought to life by Sandvik’s engineering skills.

We then used Sandvik’s digital manufacturing tools, to bring the statue to life. The final model was a 500 kg statue crafted from stainless steel. The statue was unveiled to the world as a permanent exhibit at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm.

From idea to execution the project took over a year. First, we used multiple AI programmes to study the unique styles of each artist and generated a design that incorporated all their styles. We then used human pose estimators, videogame algorithms, specialized AI and depth estimators to turn the 2D image into a 3D model. Finally, Using Sandvik’s cutting edge tools, the Impossible statue was carved into reality from 2 tonnes of stainless steel. The final statue was carved from over 16 million surface polygons and differed in accuracy only by 0.03% from the digital version.

Weighing over 500kg, ‘The Impossible Statue’ was launched at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm during the city’s museum week. It was accompanied with films teasing the project and showing the in-depth making of the statue to drive consideration. All content was hosted at a purpose-built site on Sandvik.com.