DD: From Me to You

About the Work

DD: From Me to You is a nonlinear interactive work that combines mystery, romance, and horror through the visual grammar of 1990s–2000s shōjo manga. On a vertical screen, viewers follow a story composed of black-and-white manga images. Whenever they attempt to make contact with a character or object, they encounter a question and a set of choices written in the DD language.

The meaning of the DD language is not translated for the viewer. Viewers therefore cannot be certain what they have been asked or what their selected answer means. Rather than communicating a clearly defined intention, each choice becomes an event through which relationships and changes occur—even when meaning remains incompletely understood.

The story does not unfold in a single temporal direction. Depending on the viewer’s choices, scenes from the past and future are inserted into the present narrative. The same characters and events reappear in different sequences and contexts. Unable to possess the story in its entirety, the viewer moves through partial memories and traces.

At the end of the story, the viewer no longer selects from predetermined options but composes a sentence directly in the DD language. This input passes through the DD function and is transformed into a pigment with a color unique to that viewer. The pigment is then designed to leave the individual vertical screen and manifest as the figure of a butterfly or a human being on the large screen.

The colors produced by different viewers are neither blended into a single color nor unified. Each color preserves its difference while temporarily coexisting with others on a shared screen. In this work, community does not emerge through the elimination of difference. It appears when different beings manifest together while retaining their own colors and movements.

Relationship to <Kimi Ni Todoke>

This work consciously references the Korean and English titles of Karuho Shiina’s Japanese manga Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You, along with its visual language of shōjo manga and its thematic motif of approaching another person and forming a relationship. It does not, however, reproduce or adapt the original characters or narrative. Instead, it relocates the original work’s question of what it means to “reach” another person within the problems of mistranslation, untranslatability, and relationships that arise without intention.

In the romance genre, misunderstanding is often portrayed as an obstacle that the characters must overcome in order to understand one another’s feelings. By gradually exchanging words and actions regarded as sincere, the characters establish a successful romantic relationship. This work, however, begins from the premise that misunderstanding and untranslatability can never be completely resolved.

Without knowing the meaning of the questions or the consequences of their choices, viewers encounter a different memory in each episode. These memories cannot be reduced to the possession of any particular character. Instead, they appear as images closer to a “memory of place.”

In this work, reaching another person does not mean sharing an identical meaning or fully understanding them. What is at stake is the indeterminate relationship produced independently of our intentions, as well as the images and language lost in the process of that relationship’s formation. To reach, then, is not to complete a relationship or achieve mutual understanding. It is to remain in constant movement toward the Other who has been lost in the process through which the relationship came into being.

The title From Me to You does not proclaim the success of complete transmission. It implies an ethical commitment to continuing the journey toward the lost Other.

Communication Between Human and Nonhuman Beings

In this work, communication is not the exact transmission of an identical meaning from one being to another. It is a process through which beings that can never fully understand one another nevertheless produce a relationship by passing through mistranslation and uncertainty.

Even when viewers select an answer without understanding the DD language, a relationship still occurs. The result of their choice may correspond with their intention or lead to an entirely different event. Change does not necessarily originate from the intention of a sovereign subject. A relationship likewise appears as an unintentional event that no individual can fully control—an event that exceeds the subject.

The ghost emerges as a figure of this incomplete transmission. It is the memory of another person that could not be fully transmitted into the present, as well as a rupture between the images and language lost in the formation of a relationship.

Production with AI

DD: From Me to You was produced through repeated dialogue with generative AI and code-generating AI throughout its entire production process, including narrative development, manga imagery, animation, interface design, coding, and system development.

In this work, AI is not treated as a transparent tool for making production more efficient. It is a nonhuman interlocutor that processes language and images differently from a human being. During production, the AI did not simply execute the artist’s intentions. It altered characters’ forms and expressions, interpreted image sequences in reverse, generated objects that had not been requested, and distorted bodies and spaces. Even identical instructions produced different results each time.

The artist did not accept these results uncritically. He reviewed, rejected, or selected the generated outputs; redefined the conditions; revised the instructions; and edited and rearranged the images and code. The artist’s role was not to produce a finished result through a single command, but to judge and negotiate the differences generated by another system of perception, thereby constructing the work’s meaning and form.

This production process is structurally connected to the viewer’s experience within the work. Just as the artist collaborated with AI without fully understanding its language or mode of judgment, the viewer forms a relationship with an Other through the undecipherable DD language. In both cases, communication is not a process in which an original intention is reproduced without alteration. It is a process through which an event occurs by passing through mistranslation, failure, revision, and choice. The production of the work is therefore itself an experiment that asks how human beings might communicate with nonhuman beings.

The errors and deviations produced by AI are technical defects that must be corrected during production. At the same time, they are traces of human intention transformed through its passage across another system of perception. Rather than unconditionally aestheticizing these errors, the work treats the decision of which errors to remove and which differences to retain as part of the creative process itself.

Audience Experience

1. The viewer encounters a story presented in the form of black-and-white shōjo manga.
2. At moments of contact with a character or object, a question and a set of choices appear in the DD language.
3. Without knowing the meaning of the question, the viewer selects an answer.
4. Depending on that choice, different memories, times, and episodes intervene in the present narrative.
5. At the end of the story, the viewer composes a sentence using the DD language keyboard.
6. The DD language input is designed to pass through the DD function and be transformed into a pigment unique to the viewer.
7. The generated pigment is designed to appear on the large screen as the figure of a butterfly or a human being.
8. Even after the viewer has left, the color is designed to remain as a trace on the shared screen alongside other beings.

Visual Composition

The characters and backgrounds are constructed through black-and-white linework, screentone, and the textures of analogue print. The delicate character imagery associated with romance-oriented shōjo manga collides with unstable spaces, ghosts, masks, and the forms of an undecipherable language.

Color is used not as decoration but as a sign that change has occurred. Within the black-and-white world, the appearance of a colored figure or pigment indicates that a being has departed from a fixed identity and is continually becoming something different.

The work follows the principle: “Lines make the world; pigments make feeling.” The linear world of manga and the chromatic world of the large screen remain distinct, yet the viewer’s DD language input connects them as a single event.

Technical Structure

The viewer’s DD language input is designed to pass through a custom-built DD function and be transformed into pigment data. Rather than reducing the DD language input to conventional semantic interpretation, the function translates it into information governing the pigment’s color, density, and movement according to the formal rules defined within the work.

The generated pigment does not remain on the individual screen. It is transmitted to the large screen, where its color and unique identifier are applied to the material and movement of a butterfly or human figure.

The large screen does not reproduce a unified landscape. Beings with different colors, scales, depths, and movements temporarily appear within the same field while preserving their own spatiotemporal differences.

The current prototype includes the manga’s nonlinear narrative, DD language questions and input interface, animation, and the visual system for the large screen. The real-time integration connecting DD language input, pigment generation, and the appearance of entities on the large screen is currently undergoing final validation.

Online Prototype

Open the prototype ↗dd-from-me-to-you-r03.efe22.chatgpt.site