FIRST 4 PAGES OF ANIMATIONS & STORY TEXT
Notes for the Reader
The novel Pattern City (finished in 2016) has been edited for this website, and four pages are shown with the scene animations here. More will be added soon. The novel will be published with drawn illustrations this year.
The animations exist independently of the book. My art career was recently revived, so naturally I created some images for the story, and made animations. I hope you enjoy the combination. Geoff Davis 2026
IMAGES
I started with drawings and then used a generator to create variations. (See ‘Hate AI?’ below.) As usual this led to vast overproduction, so I used the images to create multiple frame animations. These are then displayed in a grid, which can be a single image, 2, 4, 6 images etc., with colour overlays and changing speeds. This algorithmic animation system has been exhibited without the text, most recently at the V&A Digital Design Weekend (2026) and the Computer Arts Society Drivers Exhibition (2025, also an earlier version, 2023). The longer art videos are shown below. In the text, the individual illustrations are used inline.
See Hate AI? blog
THE NOVEL
The overall economics of the future society are based on themes in Death In The Bubble World, my novella published across three editions of Em from 1997 (alongside a story by Hanif Kureishi). A strange world, with a currency of Easy Money Units or EMUs, used for all manner of dodgy deals.
Disaster / Escape
When an unnatural disaster strikes the prison and whole area where she works, Samantha must survive with her new adopted family and Botz robot companions, in a network of ‘arrangers’ exploiting the universal support schemes.
Transformation
Drawn into their dangerous games of survival using shifting identities, she sees their only hope of escape in the luxury orbital habitats above.
New Arrangements
After a dangerous trip to orbit as stowaways, her decision to leave her volatile child in the care of a hacked military robot unleashes violent chaos. His path to destruction or redemption shapes their future.
READ NOW (not for distribution)
ANIMATIONS
(Above) Pattern City animations were exhibited in the Computer Arts Society ‘Drivers’ exhibition at British Computer Society London from September 2025 to March 2026. They show the sequence of images with no story text.
Back cover: “When an unnatural disaster strikes, Samantha must navigate a transformed world with her new adopted family and Botz robot companions. Their chance for escape lies in the luxury orbital habitats above, but her decision to leave her volatile son behind with a hacked military robot unleashes chaos that threatens everything.”
The second video (below) shows the different grids, colour overlays and speeds.
Geoff Davis Pattern City – also (on the tablet) Minimal – a 2 year pixel art program from Micro Arts 1985. CAS Drivers Exhibition 2025-2026
The animation is a figurative, ambient art companion to the novel, with grid changes, colour overlays, layered motion, dissolves. Shifting variations resemble constructive memory or imagination, where images remain provisional and change with context.
Drawing on film montage and experimental cinema, the work visualises literary theories of open, reader-shaped texts.
Geoff Davis is a PEN-published author and digital artist; founder of Micro Arts and Story Software; holds a Masters in Electronic Arts from Middlesex University Lansdown Centre; and MPhil in AI and Text from the University of the Arts London.