I began The Discovery of Shared Worlds with six charcoal drawings made through Surrealist automatism. I drew without a predetermined image and without erasing, following forms as they emerged. I wanted to take that uncertainty further: what might happen if the forms encountered another way of being imagined?
Through an iterative exchange with AI, the drawings became digital sculptural bodies and moving environments. I directed this transformation while allowing unfamiliar interpretations to challenge what I thought the drawings could become. For me, reimagining begins here, in the space between recognising a form and allowing it to become something I had not foreseen.
The film moves through three encounters. In The Birth of Inner Worlds, separate forms draw close and give rise to something resembling the beginning of life. In A World Takes Root, entanglement becomes shelter and a forest emerges. In The Architecture of Becoming, curved and stepped forms join in a structure that opens to the ocean, admitting life beyond the beings that brought it into existence.
What interests me is what these transformations ask of the beings involved. Each must give up something of its earlier form for a shared world to exist. Yet their differences persist. The new worlds carry traces of separate origins, and their strangeness, beauty and strength are inseparable from the changes that made them possible.
The surrender does not end with the first encounter. A world needs to be sustained. It asks for care, room and continuing change; eventually, it may grow beyond the intentions of those who created it. I recognise this tension in intimacy, friendship and parenthood: the desire to build a life together, and the fear that making room for another might leave too little room for oneself.
The making of the film holds a related tension. Passing my drawings through AI meant relinquishing some control over their interpretation while retaining responsibility for what I chose to make of the results. I selected, rejected and revised the generated material, directing the relationships, movement, pacing, text and sound. The possibility of being surprised remained part of the work, alongside the obligation to decide what those surprises meant.
I wanted to hold two fears together: losing ourselves in what we create with another, and protecting ourselves so completely that we never discover what might have existed between us. What must we give up for a shared world to live, and what must remain ours if we are to keep living within it?
