NOTHING

In 2025, Dougal Drummond at MOIR brought me in to rework Nothing, one of the venue’s existing rooms, rebuilt around a new circular LED screen. The brief was a ten-minute playback film following an AI agent’s search for meaning, scored to an original composition from Dougal and built around a single question machine can’t quite answer: what is love?

The piece plays as one unbroken search. It opens inside the agent’s own command-line interface, generating its own ASCII art through a custom Python tool I built, before pulling answers from a scrolling archive of real voices — Alan Watts, John Lennon, Ram Dass, Tesla, Einstein and Plato — each one proposed and then glitched into the next. Even an exhaustive search through recorded human thought isn’t enough. Nothing and Everything collapse into each other, the search errors out, and the screen cuts to black.

That’s the turn the piece is built around: language and data can only take the agent so far. To understand love, it has to experience it. From there, the film opens into full 3D animation as two avatars meet and dance, shifting the story from trying to define human experience to actually experiencing it. The final piece was delivered in three separate language versions for MOIR’s playback system.

Getting the two avatars right was the hardest part of the whole piece. They needed to be abstract enough to avoid reading as literal characters, while still recognisably human, with every beat of their relationship carried through movement rather than expression or dialogue.

The room itself carries part of the weight. A central Minuit Une IVL Photon laser sits behind the screen, flanked by two Chauvet Rogue Outcast beams. The hanging screen naturally limits the fixtures’ throw, so the lighting was designed around that physical relationship rather than treating the screen as an obstruction. Haze is concealed inside one of the room’s scenic portals, allowing the beams to read as atmosphere within the space rather than revealing an obvious source.