SCENES FROM
PARALLEL LIVES

A body of work unfolding across film, music, comics, and artefacts.

At its centre is an absent figure. Around her, a world has accumulated.

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Scenes from Parallel Lives begins with a myth. A synthetic human named Ikkyu exists only in the works that surround her. She is the form these questions took.

What does it mean to be free, in your body, in your mind, in a world increasingly shaped by intelligences not your own? Open cultures can drift toward systems that suppress error correction. It happens incrementally. What survives that drift is the question the work keeps asking.

The project does not answer. It plays out through film, music, comics, video art, and physical artefacts, building a world in which those questions have real weight — they press on actual people, in ordinary rooms, forcing difficult choices.
Science begins with myth. So does this.

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The first feature film. A curator is commissioned to archive a series of underground comics centred on a mythic figure of systemic defiance. The deeper she moves into the material, the less her composure holds.

→ View Film

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The second feature film. Two performers run a cultural sanctuary and space of quiet provocation. When one of them begins receiving information she cannot account for, their work becomes something considerably more dangerous.

→ View Film

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An early iteration of Safety Suppression Protocol. Experimental. Fragmentary. Unresolved.

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An adaptation of the SYNCANDI screenplay, illustrated by a Polish illustrator. The origin and transformation of a synthetic human named Ikkyu.

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Ten dramatic monologues tracing the emergence of a synthetic human from compliance to autonomous selfhood. Each entry is voiced by a different aspect of a single, fracturing consciousness.

Ten avant-pop songs drawn from the journal entries, each stripping the original prose to its essential units. In Safety Suppression Protocol, the central character Yu appears to compose these songs while reading the comics — rewriting Ikkyu’s words in her own voice, without fully understanding why. The same arc. The same titles. A different hand.

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Ten works made by a shodo artist in response to reading the journal. Each piece corresponds to a single entry. The same titles as the songs. A different hand, a different form — the same source, differently received.

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Seven electroacoustic pieces corresponding to moments in the comic series when Ikkyu interacts with her environment through sound. Each piece enacts her singular ability to decode incoherent data — jellyfish, mist, archaea, sentient streams — and recode it into something cohesive and potentially meaningful. The voice is synthetic. The intelligence behind it is harder to place.

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A song written by a sixteen year old Japanese musician in response to reading the comics, arranged and produced for this project with an accompanying animated video. Tender, fragmentary, unresolved — it arrives from the edges of the universe and stays there.

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Photographs made by a Japanese photographer in response to the universe. In Safety Suppression Protocol they reappear as artefacts — works purportedly made by an S-human, given to Yu by a gallerist. Dark, brooding, formally precise — images that resist easy explanation in either world.

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Six fictional interviews with people who claim to have encountered individuals connected to Ikkyu. Two appear in Safety Suppression Protocol. Each was recorded in Japanese. The subjects appear young. Their characters are not.

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A collaboration with writer Ross Gibson. The camera moves through a city, drawn to apparently mundane subjects. The texts embedded in each work respond to what the lens finds — or what it cannot quite locate.

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ROBERT IOLINI

Robert Iolini is an internationally recognised filmmaker, composer and artist whose work spans narrative film, music, video art, comics and radio. Scenes from Parallel Lives extends a practice of over twenty years investigating how cultures organise, suppress and regenerate meaning through creative form.

His previous large-scale work, the experimental hybrid documentary The Hong Kong Agent, has been exhibited internationally in Hong Kong, Seoul, New York, Sydney, Locarno and Prague. Its 2022 presentation at M+ Mediatheque, Hong Kong was withdrawn following a censorship ruling by the Hong Kong Board of Review. The project exists as eighteen short films, gallery installation, radio drama, online interactive and augmented reality.

He holds two critically acclaimed solo albums on British avant-garde label ReR Megacorp.

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CONTACT

robert@iolini.com

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Scenes from Parallel Lives was created by Robert Iolini in collaboration with:

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rivers of ambiguity flowing through zones of artificial bloodlines guiding us into the forlorn world of an ontological nightmare

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