On Dragon Hunt and Mutual Transformability after Samuel R. Delany.

The article focuses on an artistic project inspired by Samuel R. Delany’s 1984 science fiction novel *Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand*, exploring themes of mutual transformability through a multidisciplinary collaboration involving dance, animation, queer theory, and machine learning algorithms. The project interprets Delany’s concept of “dragon hunting” on the fictional planet Velm—a ritual where hunters neurologically connect with dragons to experience their perspective—as a metaphor for embodied, collective transformation and sensory exchange. Utilizing machine vision and somatic practices, the work materializes the novel’s narrative and sensory experience into a film that blends text, image, movement, and sound, emphasizing transformation as a shared, ephemeral process rather than a fixed identity. The artist frames this creative endeavor as a “technology of friendship,” highlighting collaboration among artists, algorithms, landscape, and literature as a means of exploring queer intimacy and collective imagination.