Recurring Now

Exploring the Intersection of Transformation, Memory, and AI-Generated Visuals

When transformation becomes a visual meditation, art takes on new dimensions. My latest AI art animation film “Recurring Now: What Changes, What Remains” has been selected for the shortlist of the first Hamburg AI Creators Award in the Moving Image category. This marks a significant milestone in the evolving landscape of AI-generated art.

What Is “Recurring Now: What Changes, What Remains”?

“Recurring Now” is an experimental AI animation film that explores the philosophical tension between permanence and change through visual metaphors. The film centers around a recurring geometric motif that appears across multiple contexts, scales, and interpretations.

From intimate studio settings with flowing white drapes to vast aerial perspectives over ocean waters, from Buddhist monks in ceremonial formation to urban cityscapes, the cube becomes a constant presence in an ever-shifting world. This visual anchor invites viewers to contemplate what remains unchanged in our lives even as everything around us transforms.

The Concept Behind the Film

The film’s title encapsulates its central question: In the eternal “now” that we inhabit, what aspects of our existence persist while others evolve? The cube shape serves as a symbolic thread—simultaneously geometric and organic, rigid and fluid—representing those essential elements that define us even as we navigate constant change.

Through AI-generated imagery, I’ve created a visual poem that moves between scales and contexts, suggesting that certain patterns recur throughout our lives, relationships, and collective human experience. Whether manifested in personal rituals, architectural forms, natural phenomena, or spiritual practices, these recurring elements anchor us in the flow of time.

Selected for the Hamburg AI Creators Award 2025

Being selected for the HAICA shortlist in the Moving Image category is both an honor and validation of AI’s role in contemporary artistic expression. The Hamburg AI Creators Award is Germany’s first competition dedicated to recognizing and promoting creative work made with artificial intelligence, creating a platform for exchange, inspiration, and new aesthetic pathways.

The Moving Image category celebrates everything that moves—within a maximum of 10 minutes, including commercial films, short films, trailers, or animations, where AI dissolves genre boundaries and opens new narrative spaces. The organizers seek works that demonstrate how creators develop their own visual language through image, editing, and AI.

The Creative Process: AI as Artistic Partner

Creating “Recurring Now” involved working with various AI image generation tools to craft each scene while maintaining visual coherence across dramatically different contexts. The challenge wasn’t just generating beautiful images, but creating a cohesive narrative flow that allows the cube motif to feel both intentional and organic.

The AI became a collaborative partner in exploring visual possibilities I might not have imagined otherwise. By iterating on prompts and refining outputs, I could push beyond conventional cinematography into dreamlike territories where symbolic meaning takes precedence over literal representation.

Visual Themes and Symbolism

The film weaves together several visual environments, each offering a different perspective on the central theme:

Intimate Interior Spaces: White draped studios create contemplative spaces where individuals interact with the orange fabric, suggesting personal transformation and introspection.

Aerial Perspectives: Bird’s-eye views of geometric structures in ocean settings and urban landscapes emphasize pattern and repetition at larger scales, connecting individual experience to collective human activity.

Spiritual Imagery: Buddhist monks in ceremonial arrangements echo the film’s geometric motif while introducing themes of ritual, tradition, and spiritual continuity.

Urban and Natural Environments: Cityscapes and natural settings demonstrate how recurring patterns exist across human-made and organic worlds.

Why AI Art Matters

The selection of “Recurring Now” for HAICA reflects a broader cultural shift in how we perceive AI-generated art. Rather than viewing AI as a threat to human creativity, awards like HAICA recognize that AI tools enable new forms of artistic expression that would be impossible or prohibitively expensive through traditional means.

The Hamburg AI Creators Award originated from an internal AI film competition at Hamburg production company Unlimited Visions, which evolved into a public format and community initiative aimed at making the creative minds behind generative AI visible. This institutional support signals growing recognition of AI art as a legitimate creative field.

The Award Show Experience

The HAICA award ceremony will take place on November 6, 2025, at Kent Club in Hamburg, featuring four categories—Moving Image, Music Video, New Talent, and Still—where the best works of the year will be awarded, the shortlist will be shown on a large screen, and insights into jury decisions will be provided.

For artists working with AI, events like HAICA provide invaluable opportunities to connect with peers, share techniques, and contribute to the evolving discourse around AI creativity. The evening promises to be a celebration of what happens when technology meets intuition.

Watch the Film

You can experience “Recurring Now: What Changes, What Remains” on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHCuRFWbJ6o

Reflections on Change and Continuity

Creating this film has been a journey of exploring my own relationship with change. We live in an era of unprecedented transformation—technological, environmental, social—yet we still seek those anchoring elements that give life meaning and coherence.

The cube shape in “Recurring Now” represents different things to different viewers: perhaps a symbol of clarity, a spiritual mandala, an architectural principle, or simply an aesthetic constant in chaos. That interpretive openness is intentional. Art shouldn’t prescribe meaning but rather create space for personal reflection.

The Future of AI Art

As AI tools become more sophisticated and accessible, I believe we’ll see an explosion of creative work that challenges our assumptions about art, authorship, and creativity itself. The question isn’t whether AI-generated art is “real” art—that debate misses the point entirely. The question is: what new forms of expression, new visual languages, and new ways of seeing become possible when we embrace these tools?

“Recurring Now” is my contribution to that conversation. By being selected for the HAICA shortlist, it joins a growing body of work demonstrating that AI art can be thoughtful, aesthetically compelling, and conceptually rich.

Learn More

For more information about the Hamburg AI Creators Award, visit https://haic-award.de. To explore more of my AI art projects and creative work, browse through my portfolio here on this site.