Tiny Storms:
Video is the New Sketch.

Join the upcoming class: Video as a sketching practice to test ideas, tell stories, or prototype research.

🧪 WHAT IT IS

Tiny Storms is a live online class and a creative method.What if video was your sketchbook? Direct, alive, experimental. A fast way to prototype ideas when endless tools make starting hard and staying with an idea even harder.It’s not another method for being supercreative superfast superbold, nor a debate about whether machines can be creative. It gives a critical lens on creativity and generative AI.

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It exposes how rebellion itself has become a managerial strategy and arises from the blind spot in how humans treat creativity as survival and agency.

  • It's a thinking device: reflection happens in the hands-on process, in the moment a tool refuses to behave. In a culture addicted to infinite loops of production and meaning, Tiny Storms turns to what artists already know: contradiction isn’t meant to be resolved. It’s not about creating new stuff happily. It’s about staying alive in the storm, becoming tiny versions of it.
  • It helps to think and create when endless tools make starting hard and staying with an idea even harder. Animation used to take weeks or months. With today’s AI and procedural tools, video sketching is possible at the pace of thought.
  • Developed over years, the Tiny Storms method is inspired by thinkers who challenge the myths of creativity, from neuroscientist Le Cunff’s Tiny Experiments to architect Leski’s Storm of Creativity to historian Franklin’s Cult of Creativity.
  • In this course you’ll:
  • - Make short experimental animations as prototypes for ideas of all kinds.
  • - Learn to use video as a tool to test ideas, tell stories, or communicate research.
  • - Play with both AI and analog materials that resist control.
  • - Balance speed and play with critical reflection.
  • - See the instructors’ process in action, projects across science communication, digital theater, and personal narrative, showing how one method moves across contexts.
  • Computer artists warned sixty years ago about the misuse of technology in art. The same applies today. This class takes both sides seriously: the joy of speed and play, and the responsibility of critical reflection.

For who

Anyone who wants to use video as a sketching practice, to test ideas, tell stories, or prototype research. If you’ve ever wished you could show an idea in motion instead of explaining it, this class is for you: artist, scientist, beginner, or simply curious.

Learn to use video for fast prototyping

Course Outline

1. Prototyping as Noticing: Which detail is so ordinary you’ve stopped noticing it, and what if it became a superhero?2. Prototyping with Constraints: What if you erased every option except the one that scares you most?3. Prototyping Against Norms: If your work could insult you, what would it say, and how would you answer back?4. Prototyping in Public: What happens when your tools stop obeying you and you lose control in public?5. Prototyping Futures: What futures do these tools enable, and at what cost?

TAKEAWAY

You’ll also get a workbook, not a handout, but a zine-shaped tool from visual art and experimental publishing. It’s a guide and a playground where you can annotate, remix, and turn any idea into moving images.

What if video was your sketchbook?

TOOLS

We’ll use both generative AI and traditional media as part of the Tiny Storms Method. Tools aren’t here for tutorials or mastery, they’re here to misbehave with you. Each one is introduced briefly, just enough to open new directions, show what’s possible, and let you bend it your own way.You don’t need to know them in advance. Curiosity is enough.Examples may include:AI / procedural: Runway, Luma, Veo, Houdini
Physical / analog: watercolor, body movement, pen plotter

Video Portfolio Highlights

Here are a few fragments from the instructor’s work, across science communication, digital theater, and personal narrative.

Folding Landscape
Prototype for communicating mathematical research.
3D animation inspired by polyomino folding, developed with MPI MIS Leipzig.

Glacier Climate Data Visualization
Turning glacier mass balance data into immersive stage storytelling.
Commissioned for a dance & digital theater production.

Suuperpose
Prototype of human–machine collaboration in live audiovisual systems, mixing AI & analog glitch.
Babin x Maïm, performed at Berlin New Media Week.

Du siehst mich
Experimental short AI video on technology's misuse, and the tension between human perception, machine vision, and simulated intimacy. Created with generative and procedural techniques.

Embodied Verbs
A collection of short generative experiments with verbs like fly, observe, bind, bathe.
Created through a hybrid workflow combining TouchDesigner, Houdini, and AI-based tools.

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Bring Tiny Storms to Your Institution

Want to host a masterclass, workshop, or lab?

Video is the New Sketch: A masterclass on using video as a rapid prototyping tool, treating moving images as sketches to play with systems, test ideas, and communicate visually. Designed for both artists and scientists.Participants learn to:
Use video workflows as creative sketchbooks.
Apply procedural and generative tools.
Translate abstract research/data into moving-image prototypes.Interested in hosting a workshop or masterclass?

SIGN UP

  • 10. November - 8. December 2025

  • Online!

  • Five-weeks, Mondays, 6-8pm CET

  • Small class of participants

About the Instructor

Yaron Maïm is a Swiss-French artist and researcher based in Berlin and Geneva. They developed the Tiny Storms Method, a framework for rapid video sketching that studies how imagination behaves under computational pressure. Their work bridges animation, digital theatre, and science communication, exploring how creative systems can care, not just compute.

Contact

Curious about Tiny Storms? Reach out.

💬 hello [at] yaronmaim.com

Tiny Storms, Yaron Maim Studio, 2025.
✦ Video turned into prototypes in motion