I AM ERROR, HD CGI film, Runtime: 30 minutes 28 seconds, Commissioned by Gasworks with support from the Freeland’s Foundation.

The 30-minute animation unfolds as a sequence of cinematic fragments from an imaginary video game, yet unlike conventional cutscenes, where the armoured hero remains visually consistent and narratively stable, this protagonist is never fixed. His body is in continual flux, reshaped through contact with other lifeforms whose touch renders him permeable and unstable. In contrast to the hard, sealed surfaces that typically define digital masculinity, here the body is porous, susceptible, and open to transformation.

Drawing on the visual intensity of fantasy erotica and the excess of body horror, Al-Sabah reframes metamorphosis not as failure but as possibility. The hero’s growth is literal and uncontained. Limbs sprout, skin merges with writhing flowers, and flesh entangles with tentacular creatures. These sequences unsettle the historical ideal of the self-contained male avatar, so often coded as invulnerable, disciplined, and sovereign within game worlds. Instead, identity becomes relational, produced through touch, proximity, and contamination.

The imaginary game space thus stages a theoretical reversal. Where digital systems typically depend on stable character models and clear boundaries between player and environment, hero and enemy, Al-Sabah collapses these divisions. The environment is not a backdrop but an active agent of change. Vulnerability, rather than mastery, drives the narrative forward. By allowing the hero’s body to blend into its surroundings, the film challenges the fantasy of control embedded in gaming history and proposes a different logic, one in which transformation, hybridity, and surrender complicate traditional notions of selfhood in both digital and real worlds.