DD: From Me to You

Within the memories of DD residents in a black-and-white shōjo manga, a visitor writes a letter using DD characters whose meanings cannot be fully deciphered. Through AI interpretation and calculation, the character sequence becomes a digital pigment. The letter does not return to its intended addressee. Instead, its pigment reaches a shared field of other traces and leaves colour on a being.

The first field: a letter within the manga

On a portrait touchscreen, visitors enter the memories of DD residents through black-and-white manga. DD questions and choices appear intermittently, without a supplied explanation of their meanings. Each choice changes the order of scenes and reveals relationships between characters differently. At the end, a visitor writes a letter using DD characters.

The second field: DD: Landscape

A floor display between three terminals becomes a shared field. It is not the ending of the manga: it is a space in which the residues of earlier participants coexist during the exhibition. The letter intended for a DD resident arrives among the traces of others. The “You” is no longer a fixed recipient; it slides towards strangers the visitor has not met.

This misdelivery is not a technical failure. It is the work’s central movement: an utterance leaves its author’s intention and understanding, and enters a new relationship.

The work uses the visual grammar of East Asian shōjo manga from the 1990s and 2000s as a partially legible cultural signal in Munich. Faces, gazes and distances may be felt immediately, while screentones and the ordering of relationships are read differently according to a viewer’s background. This echoes the opacity of DD.

At the centre, an approximately 3.0 × 2.0 m walkable outdoor LED field is proposed. Broad empty space surrounds sparsely distributed, moving, matte-coloured forms. Humans and butterflies coexist unevenly in the same space, at different scales and depths.

Human forms are planned to stand on differently oriented ground layers. They occupy the same surface without sharing a single ground plane, so a viewer looking down cannot see every figure upright from any one position. Future transformations between human and butterfly retain a cool, artificial quality rather than simulate lush nature.

Day and night

By day, a warm white or light grey background connects the field to the black-and-white pages as a “walkable digital paper”. This also addresses readability on a horizontal screen exposed to sunlight. As ambient light falls, the background transitions to black over 30–60 seconds. Coloured forms then move through black emptiness at different depths and speeds.

Three approximately 2.4 m high manga pages face inward from three directions, leaving a fourth side open. Final pen-and-screentone artwork, cropped panels and enlarged DD characters replace the provisional imagery. Each page includes a portrait terminal.

The pages act as beacons, enlarge black-and-white manga into public space, offer a sheltered place to participate, and create a threshold between private reading and collective observation. The letter is written privately in front of a page, while its trace is collectively overlooked and crossed. The DD resident is a flat, intended recipient inside the manga; in the field, the letter becomes colour and a being.

A nonhuman interlocutor

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.

Judging and negotiating

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.

The same structure as the visitor’s

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.

Which errors to keep

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.