BLE BLVD

Project

Rapid Third Eye Movement

Multidisciplinary artist collective

2023–

Rapid Third Eye Movement is a multidisciplinary artist collective formed by me and writer Antti Huhtanen. Our shared practice combines illustration, short fiction and symbolic research, drawing from mythology, esotericism, alchemy and psychology to explore the stranger territories of human experience.

Rather than illustrating stories after they are written, or writing narratives around finished images, the visual and literary work develops in dialogue. Recurring symbols, characters and themes move between the two disciplines, gradually forming a shared mythology.

Art direction, illustration, animation, website

Emilia Kaupinmäki

Short stories

Antti Huhtanen

Visit

rapidthirdeyemovement.com

 

 

A shared visual-literary practice

R3M began as an experiment in combining illustration and short fiction around shared symbolic subjects. Antti’s stories and my illustrations approach the same themes from different directions: sometimes one precedes the other, sometimes an image inspires a narrative, and sometimes both develop around a shared idea.

The resulting works move between the surreal and the humorous, using familiar mythological and esoteric symbols as material for contemporary stories about identity, transformation and the unconscious.

 

In 2024, we began developing the existing works into a web-based visual-literary narrative. Instead of presenting the stories and illustrations as an archive, the website sequences them into a loose thematic cycle connected through recurring characters, symbols and narrative transitions.

The experience begins with the R3M Manifesto and The Daydreams of a Demiurge, which functions as a framing narrative before the reader enters the increasingly surreal world of the subsequent stories.

Navigation becomes part of the storytelling. Illustration, fiction, animation, interface and responsive design therefore operate as parts of the same work rather than separate disciplines.