Process

I sit at my table surrounded by scattered pages from old natural history books, aviation manuals, and yellowed technical diagrams—fragments of Bristol’s industrial past and the wild pulse of life itself. With precision scissors in hand, I begin the slow, deliberate cut: each reptile’s scale, each serpent’s coil, every gear tooth and piston curve freed one by one from its original context. There is no rush; the act is meditative, almost ritualistic. I trace the edges until the paper yields, isolating forms that once belonged to separate worlds—zoological plates meeting Rolls-Royce engine schematics, fish gliding across hexagonal bases, turtles nesting in segmented chambers. Layer by layer I build, gluing with the lightest touch so the seams remain visible, a quiet reminder that this is not seamless fusion but chosen assembly. The process demands patience and reverence: every cut is a decision, every placement a conversation between the mechanical and the organic, between the cold precision of Bristol’s aero-engine heritage and the teeming, untamed minds of creatures that have never known blueprints.

In the finished piece, that towering purple-and-gold spiral becomes more than an engine—it is a symbol of convergence, a cosmic ark where other minds meet. The Rolls-Royce form at its core nods to Bristol’s legacy of human ingenuity reaching for the sky, yet I’ve filled its chambers with lizards, snakes, monkeys, eels, and fish, as though the machine has awakened and invited every living intelligence aboard.

The serpents winding through gears speak of ancient wisdom threading modern ambition; the tiny turtles crawling the edges remind us of slow, enduring life persisting amid speed and thrust. Suspended against the starry void, the whole structure hovers fragile and infinite—a hand-cut hymn to the idea that intelligence is never solitary. It is collective, hybrid, spiraling outward from our own making into something vaster: a meeting place where mechanical minds, animal minds, and perhaps even the emergent minds we are only beginning to glimpse all coil together, breathing as one against the dark.

My favourite thing from the Other Minds season in September 2024 was the final showcase of the six More Than AI Sandbox prototypes. Standing there, watching people interact—leaning in, speaking softly, waiting for responses, their faces lighting up with surprise or quiet wonder—felt like the heart of the whole thing. My spiraling Rolls-Royce collage presided above, but the real power was in those direct, unscripted encounters: fragile moments where humans met other intelligences without trying to dominate them, turning big questions about minds, labour and creativity into something intimate and alive.