Lovework Studio gives Reactor an identity for the next frontier in AI

Reactor is building the infrastructure for AI world models – the systems that let creative coders generate real-time, interactive video, and from it instant games, responsive scenes and training simulations. Lovework Studio was brought in to define the strategy, identity and digital toolkit for a company in a category that barely exists yet. The problem was time – the world models the studio tested at the start were, as Co-founder Campbell Butler puts it, “curious and clunky,” so Lovework had to design for what the technology would become, not what it was. To design for a moving target, the studio leaned into the tools themselves, working with a large array of generative systems for rapid visualisation, world creation and interactive video, to simulate the experiences it expected Reactor to reach. “We used a huge array of different AI tools to simulate and create the worlds that we expected,” Butler tells us, “and when the World Models caught up, the team were ready.” Sticking with one tool, he notes, only ever yields one kind of output; diversifying kept the work anchored to the studio’s own ideas. The identity centres on a symbol the studio calls Chip, formed by rotating the two ‘R’s in Reactor to lock into a single mark – looking like something between a transistor, a space invader and an ancient artefact. It arrived through analogue play, well before the technology came near it. “We drew and sketched with charcoal, cut out shapes with paper, rotated and moulded shapes with acetate to find something that we could interact with, and that felt right,” Butler explains. The mark had to carry movement. Like the worlds Reactor makes possible, Chip needed to feel able to travel through time, from ancient history to alien futures.