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Last week, some of you may have read about Nike’s Chalkbot campaign at the Tour de France. The campaign deployed what was basically a giant chalkjet printer attached to the back of a truck to promote cancer awareness, Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong foundation, and itself (of course not necessarily in that order).

Image via.

Not long after the unveiling, a representative from the Institute for Applied Autonomy informed the nettime mailing list that Chalkbot bore a remarkable resemblance to the same’s GraffitiWriter project.

Here is an excerpt:

Since 1998, the Institute for Applied Autonomy has been inventing and building robots to protest the militarization of robotics research and to reassert the public’s ownership of public space. Among the machines we produced were GraffitiWriter, a small remote controlled robot capable of printing high-speed text graffiti on the pavement while driving…

In pointing out that the Nike Chalkbot is a higher-resolution/higher-budget but otherwise obvious descendent [sic] of the StreetWriter (SWX), we do not claim any sort of ownership over the project or the idea…we have long expected our anti-corporate project to one day be reappropriated as an advertising scheme…

I thought that the Near Future Laboratory put it well: "Something definitely happens when a concept dips into the world of corporate sponsorship — it’s authenticity and the trust behind the principles begins to dissipate quite rapidly. It becomes bland eyeball candy, is all."