Drawing Into Motion: Exploring AI Image Animation with Runway

I've been feeding my drawings into Runway.

It started as curiosity not as a plan. I had a body of work: the Diagrams series, ink marks on paper that sit somewhere between notation and abstraction, almost-machines, almost-maps. Structural but organic. Precise but uncertain. Purposefully inbetween and ambigious. I wanted to see what would happen if I introduced them to an AI image animation tool and let the machine make a move.

Runway is a generative AI video tool that takes a still image and animates it — using machine learning to predict motion, introduce flow, suggest life where there was none. The results are cool but I had to be carefuly with my prompts to maintain the integrity of my original work. My drawn lines, which I have always thought of as fixed and considered, suddenly move. Forms that threatened to resolve into something recognisable now actually move — a slow atmospheric shift, a drift.

I was pleased that the handdrawn is still there.

This is the thing about working with AI image generation and animation tools: there's a persistent assumption that the machine takes over, that the human mark gets smoothed out, homogenised, made generic. In my experience with Runway that hasn't been true. The gesture of a drawn line these survive. The AI reads them and responds to them, but only has instructed. The output feels collaborative rather than replacement.

And yet I hold this with some uncertainty. I'm excited by what I've made — the arc series on this site is a direct result of this exploration — but I'm not sure yet where it leads. There's a question I keep returning to: at what point does AI-assisted art become something other than my practice? I don't have an answer. I'm not sure the question has one. Previously I made an animated video with voice over of my diagrams for a talk in China. It was great fun and combined the ideas of the abstract with these meticious imagined but uncertain worlds.

What I do know is that the tension I've always worked in — between the mechanical and the human, the diagram and the drawing, the system and the gesture — is exactly the territory that AI image tools make newly visible. The machine is almost human. My drawings were always almost machine. Somewhere in that gap, the work happens. I love the power of technology but also the natural and human.

The Arc animations are viewable here.