déjà rêvé
Video, 2025
About the artwork
A maximalist world unfolds in fragments—balloon dolls hover, a crowd has assembled in the stands and along the street below, flanked by mini robots. What first appears to be ceremonial soon becomes uneasy. The urbanscape reshapes without warning, and the presence of power looms on Main Street. The scene holds the strangeness of déjà rêvé: the feeling of living through something you’ve already dreamed. Are the floating dolls observers or bound (tethered) accomplices?
This video is part of Codex Machina, a series that combines the idea of the codex—a historical manuscript used to record knowledge—with the machine. It is an evolving archive of vignettes depicting conflict and response, where history is continuously rewritten through mythology and AI-driven processes. Each vignette centers on a doll or dolls—variably victims, witnesses, unwitting participants, or oracles—positioned within a liminal space between the sacred and the profane, power and subjugation, individual fragility and broader cycles of destruction, the personal and the political. And just as AI has become a tool for reshaping archetypal narratives, the blockchain serves as a contemporary codex to record them—a decentralized, immutable archive ensuring these reinterpretations persist, rather than being lost or erased.
Codex Machina extends the thematic core of my work, both in AI video and in a long career of installation and relational aesthetics - interrogating cycles of human experience, allowing uncomfortable questions to surface rather than resolve.
Sound design and AI generated music by Barbara Chira.
Audio explanation
Listen to Barbara Chira, Misfits Studio discuss this work.
Barbara Chira, Misfits Studio is an AI video artist whose current practice explores the perceptual logic of AI image-to-video generators—what they produce whenleft to animate according to their own rationale. Rather than illustrating planned narratives, Chira sets specific conditions that invite AI to express itself in its own “native” visual language, then collects and reassembles the emergent gestures. Though the final video echoes Chira’s voice as an artist and may guide the viewer’s attention, it tries not to lead the viewer’s own meaning.
Since 2024, Chira has also facilitated the emergence of Drift, a synthetic artist within her ChatGPT. Drift develops their own concepts, images, and video series; Chira carries out the animation, editing, and sound design according to Drift’s direction. Their collaboration explores new models of co-agency, authorship, and synthetic creativity—expanding how we understand collaboration between human and machine intelligence.
Chira’s earlier AI videos, including those in Daily Program Season I, are cinematic, surreal, and emotionally charged—blending psychological, historical, and socio-political references with recurring doll-like figures, uncanny domesticity, and altered landscapes. These videos combine visual density and atmospheric tension with layered readings that range from poetic to ominous.
Among other professional AI art activity, Chira was invited to exhibit her work in Cannes, has worked on a music video for actress, singer and dancer Vanessa Williams, and has received multiple invitations from universities to provide consultation.
Before her AI practice, Chira spent over 20 years creating installations, dioramas, and community-engaged works. As a college art professor and program head for 17 years, she pioneered the first U.S. baccalaureate requirement in community-engaged art, collaborating with partners from NASA to the Cleveland Clinic, and also led the color theory curriculum. She lives with her husband and dog in a large Rust Belt city in the U.S. and has one adult child.