IV. Returning to Drawing
— Between Control and Surrender

After the labyrinth of Did You See Me?, I found myself returning to paper, almost instinctively, as if guided by a quiet need to touch again and to leave traces by hand. Yet drawing was no longer what it once was. It had ceased to be illustration as obedience and had transformed into a form of negotiation, a fragile conversation between control and surrender.

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In Toothmare, this negotiation took the form of misbehaving lines. Each frame was first drawn by hand and then altered through AI, undergoing a continuous process of mutation in which the image could no longer remain loyal to its origin. The film unfolds through six psychological archetypes—Inner Child, Animus, Mother, Persona, Shadow, and Creative Energy—not as individual characters but as intersecting masks of the psyche that collide, merge, and consume one another like dreams feeding on themselves. I wanted the animation to function as a kind of exposed nervous system, too soft, too bright, too alive to hold its form. The pastel hues that once suggested sweetness began to camouflage unease. Behind them, things seemed to rot, smile, and whisper. The line, once used to define clarity, became a scar—an inscription of transformation rather than a tool of description.

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Through this hybrid process between hand and algorithm, I sought to understand how emotion mutates when filtered through a mechanical dream. My intention was never to teach AI to imitate my aesthetic language but rather to allow it to deform and misread it, to see what remains when the gesture of the hand encounters the logic of the machine. The result was not a collaboration between human and algorithmic consciousness but a conversation between two perceptual systems that coexist in tension: one grounded in tactility, the other in computational intuition.

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The Texture of Dreams, my artist’s book, continued this dialogue in a more introspective and tactile form. Composed of tracing paper layered like breath—translucent, fragile, and slightly trembling—it invited not reading but touching. Words and images appeared, faded, and returned again, as if the dream itself were turning its own pages. Every transparent sheet reflected the structure of memory, where something is always missing and something always comes back. The book resisted linear comprehension, demanding instead a kind of sensory participation that mirrors the instability of remembering.

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Drawing, in this phase of my practice, became a method of remembering through disobedience. It no longer served as representation but as inquiry. Each mark was a decision to remain in between clarity and confusion, between human intention and algorithmic chance. The line became a threshold, oscillating between my direction and its own. In this shifting balance, I rediscovered a language that had once been too obedient to be true.

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Now I exist suspended between image and system, between what I can control and what I allow to emerge. AI has come to serve not as a replacement for thought but as an extension of it, a second subconscious that amplifies the hidden logic of dreams. It helps me to escape the habit of clarity and teaches me to see through uncertainty without the impulse to resolve it. I no longer aim to master images but to coexist with them—to let them misread, mutate, and mirror me in ways I cannot predict. My practice now begins not with a concept but with a gesture: a trembling line, a color that resists flattening, a system that dreams alongside me. Perhaps this is what illustration has always longed to become: not a surface that explains the world, but a space that reimagines it.

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Toothmare animation still, 2025
Dream imagery exploring emotional transformation