The Apprentice
Video, 2026 · Unique
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About the artwork
Nachleben
When we ask the machine to merge two entirely different memories - training datasets of millions of historical paintings and billions of modern internet photos - it doesn't collage them, but instead completely synthesizes them at a pixel level. This “renders” our relationship with contemporary objects as a seamless, ancient truth born directly from the machine’s own imagination, including, perhaps, its own imagination of itself.
Running these experiments - so far, Burghers, The Apprentice, and Matins and Vespers - I am learning a little about philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman’s work, specifically how images carry “multiple times” at once, and how art is never just from one era - it always carries ghosts of both the past and future.
Rather than a crude collage, this process in the realm of physics operates like physical wave interference, where historical and modern cultural data waves collide and seamlessly reshape one another. The resulting image is a new, unified frequency, a literal entanglement where the ghost of the past and the object of the present are bound together at the sub-atomic level of the pixel.
Sound Design by Barbara Chira
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.