DIRECTION, CG & MOTION
Welcome to my digital garden. I plant seeds haphazardly and joyfully, and see what sprouts in the spirit of exploration.
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧✿ |
SENSING TOMORROW
research brief on
machine sensing x spatial intelligence
machine sensing x spatial intelligence
Will Denning and I began crafting Sensing Tomorrow at ETC just as Claude Code was taking the world by storm in early 2026, when the possibilities seemed both terrifying and breathtaking. The research brief we wrote started on the other side of the door. A language model has never seen anything at all, yet somehow understands what the world looks like from everything humanity has written about it. The next machines can't learn secondhand. They have to step into the world and perceive it, understand it, and move through real three-dimensional space. And any technology that wants to live alongside us has to decide what matters, what to ignore, and what to do with what it sees. What a machine notices tells you what it cares about.
A robot feels the weight of things.
A car reads the road as risk.
A drone flattens the world into data from above.
A building senses the quiet rhythms of the people inside it.
We spent months reading our way into this. We looked at robots that learn their own bodies by watching themselves in a mirror, soft skins that sense a hand before it lands, swarms that steer only by their nearest neighbours, and maps built from depth, heat and density rather than appearance. Across robotics, language models, cars, farming, architecture and medicine, three kinds of awareness kept surfacing: awareness of self, of others, and of the world.
+ AWARENESS OF SELF
How a system senses, mirrors, and understands itself.
RESEARCH: At Columbia and MIT, robots are learning their own bodies by watching themselves move, like dancers practising in a mirror. Soft skins let them feel pressure, and slow down when a hand comes close.
Q: What happens when a digital twin slowly diverges from its original?
+ AWARENESS OF OTHERS
How a system senses, coordinates, and adapts to others.
RESEARCH: Swarms of simple robots can shape themselves into complex forms with a single local rule: no leaders, no maps. Each one senses only its nearest neighbours, and something collective emerges, the way it does in ants or birds.
Q: Can empathy be shown through alignment and cooperation?
+ AWARENESS OF WORLD
How a system perceives an environment, and its place within it.
RESEARCH: Robots now build layered maps of the spaces they move through, holding objects, structures and people the way we hold a room in our heads. Machines that once surveyed farmland in snapshots are learning to read it over seasons: soil, growth, decay.
Q: What does a world built from perception (not realism) look like?
Alongside the science, we kept noticing a cultural pull back towards things that feel made by hand: grain, collage, print, visible marks of process. People want intimacy and meaning from the things they're shown. The brief worked more like a field guide than a set of instructions. Each artist chose one way of sensing, one piece of science that caught their curiosity, and one question, and from those grew their own mini-brief.
Research becomes cultivation, not extraction. Experiments are allowed to branch, stall, or decay.
Two of those mini-briefs became projects of their own, Dancing with Machines and Ghost Imprints. Alongside them is some of what else grew: boards, r&d and experiments that didn't fit neatly anywhere.
a seed that never got planted
Before the brief settled into its final shape, I had a wilder idea for it. What if it wasn't a document at all, but a system? You'd feed it a topic, a paper or a half-formed hunch, and it would germinate a brief of your own. Every time an artist expanded on an idea, the brief would grow to fit their seed of exploration and cross-pollinate it with everyone else's. A machine would run the workflow, but human ideas and hands would direct it.
John Fullerton asks what the economy would look like if it were modelled after ecology. I wondered the same about a brief. Not instructions handed down from above, but something rhizomatic that spreads like fungal roots through soil, where nothing is ever quite finished and the process is the visible, beautiful part.
It never made it into the final brief. But I keep coming back to the question underneath it: what happens to the idea of a deliverable, finished and fixed, when the work becomes a living system instead?
With Will Denning, Ollie Boyle, James Britton
– ETC Research Team @ Electric Theatre Collective
ROLE – Research brief & writing, visual & conceptual research, r&d, art direction, animation, lighting & texturing, styleframes & production.
TOOLS – Figma Weave, Nano Banana Pro, Claude Code, ComfyUI, Lidar Data, Gaussian Splats, Cinema4D, Houdini, Redshift, After Effects