Sway
Video, 2026
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About the artwork
These works reveal the machine’s ongoing perceptual struggle to stabilize a world that will not hold—at the scale of a terrain in Sway, Heave, and Surge, and at the scale of a life in Signs. The same perceptual logic governs both the vast and the intimate.
In Sway, Heave and Surge, we see that something is wrong with the world itself. The world is destabilizing around us. In Signs, we begin to sense that something is wrong with how we live in the world, living in systems that barely protect us. Sway, Heave and Surge show the action of shear forces on landscape, while Signs are looping studies of public-use spaces where a stressed system shows its first signs of strain.
Where there are visible drawing lines, they aren’t random or a flourish. They help resist cinematic melancholy, instead emphasizing construction and perception. And yet, they function less as structure than as memory — a ghost of how humans once thought about making things carefully. The drawing lines signal that the work is a proposal rather than a record, inviting both the machine and the viewer to participate in its formation.
Taken together, the works ask (as in all of Project Native): What does the machine preserve when meaning is not assigned by the artist? Again and again, the models attend more faithfully to infrastructure than to the human systems that built it. This is not explicit illustration or critique; it is an attempt to let the machine reveal its own way of seeing our world.
Sound design 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.