RudeFish
鲁 德 菲 西
Research Festival
Section Overview
This section presents two ongoing projects developed for the Research Festival 2025.
Both works extend my Unit 3 research, exploring how dreams, memory, and perception can be translated into different material forms — moving image and publication.
Toothmare experiments with psychological animation, translating inner anxiety and dream logic into surreal movement.
The Texture of Dreams tests the structure of an artist’s book as a fragmented dream archive, where images, AI dialogues, and subconscious notes are interwoven through touch and transparency.
The Texture of Dreams
The Texture of Dreams (dummy), 2025
Prototype artist’s book exploring the layering of dream fragments through paper, transparency, and touch.
“A dream journal misread by AI.”
This prototype artist book extends my Unit 3 exploration of dreams and AI-generated imagery.
It investigates how a book can embody the material quality of dreaming — layered, fragmented, and partly concealed.
Rather than a readable publication, it functions as a semi-enclosed visual object,
inviting viewers to navigate between visibility and obscurity.
Structure & Material:
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Laser-cut wooden covers (20 × 15 cm)
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Mixed Riso prints and digital collage pages
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Layers of translucent and opaque paper
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Ring or screw binding to suggest looping temporality
Concept & Aim:
Through the recombination of dreams and AI dialogue, the work questions the blurred boundary between human imagination and machine perception.
Viewers encounter a visual delay — an experience of “partial access” that mirrors the logic of dreaming itself.
Currently presented as a prototype, the final version will integrate multiple paper textures and printing processes to evoke the tactile sensation of fragmented memory.
Page view from The Texture of Dreams
(dummy), 2025
Toothmare
Toothmare animation, 2025
Experimental animation exploring psychological archetypes and dream logic through visual dislocation and surreal movement.
Overview
Toothmare is an experimental animation based on psychological analysis and the "six archetypes of the psyche."
The film unfolds through the logic of dreams, translating six psychological archetypes — Inner Child, Animus, Mother, Persona, Shadow, Creative Energy — into six interconnected dreamscapes. The animation blends AI-generated visuals with hand-drawn elements, creating a "sweet yet corrupted" visual language that moves between innocence and subtle discomfort, guiding the viewer through a continually morphing psychological space. Each scene corresponds to a layer of the subconscious: childhood, conflict, motherhood, societal masks, shadow, and creative energy.
Concept
The film explores "how dreams become a mirror of the psyche when inner archetypes collide."
By using AI-generated misread images to simulate the “misread reality” of dreams, I intervene with hand-drawn and collage techniques to layer emotions and errors together.
Structurally, Toothmare abandons linear storytelling in favor of a fragmented approach, where each archetype appears in its own scene but also permeates one another, forming a psychological map built from symbols, dislocation, and cyclical patterns.
Methodology
AI Generation: Using dream journal texts, AI generated initial visuals while retaining machine misreadings.
Hand-drawn Intervention: Hand-drawn line sketches were colored digitally and processed through AI, then edited into the animation.
Sound Design: AI-generated narration scripts based on dream journals, followed by AI voice synthesis for the narration.
Structural Logic: The six archetypes are not linear narratives but interwoven, cyclical fragments of consciousness.
Artistic Aim
With this animation, I aim to test the “transformation mechanisms” of emotions in visual language — when sweetness, anxiety, and fear overlap, the imagery no longer tells a story, but becomes the movement of the psyche itself.
Toothmare is not only an animation about “misplaced dreams” but also an experiment in “perceptual structures.”
Hand-drawing process for Toothmare, 2025
Detail from the development of psychological animation,
where hand-drawn elements merge with AI-generated visuals.
Character concept for Toothmare, 2025
Visual study translating psychological archetypes into surreal doll-like figures.
Toothmare animation still, 2025
Dream imagery exploring emotional transformation.
Toothmare animation still, 2025
Dream imagery exploring emotional transformation.
Toothmare animation still, 2025
Dream imagery exploring emotional transformation.