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ABSOLUT Y2K is a new ad on the back cover of the 4/99 issue of Wired magazine. With all black lettering set against a stark white page, this 1999 ad shows the Absolut bottle shape fashioned out of a series of numbers, using only 1's and 0's, in horizontal lines. The left edge of the bottle (and a narrow border area) is clearly defined by contiguous numbers. As you pan right across the "bottle", more and more gaps appear on each line of numbers; most of the lines don't continue on to the right edge.
As we head into the new Millenium, most people know that Y2K stands for Year 2000, where the K represents a thousand. But, why did Absolut use only 1's and 0's in this ad? I believe that those numbers represent the next 1000 years. While the beginning of the millenium in Y2K is clearly defined (hence the left edge area is filled in completely), there remain many questions for the human race in the next 1000 years (hence the increasing numbers of gaps in the right side of the ad and in our knowledge of the future). There are many unknowns Y2K and beyond, including what will happen to computers (and everything run by computers) at the stroke of midnight on 1/1/2000. It should be noted that the 1's and 0's are the same two numbers used in The Binary System. Since a computer has to work with Current On and Current Off - only 2 different digits can be used: 1 for On and 0 for Off, thus building the system that the computer used. Since so much of our world is dependent on computers and potential Y2K crashes, they built a bottle out of binary numbers, but put gaps in it, knowing that nothing is absolutly certain in Y2K, except for Absolut!
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Absolut Gallery
