Flags 01
Video, 2026
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About the artwork
Flags represent the first chapter of the new year in Project Native.
Project Native is a continuing investigation of the native gestures – or more precisely, of the perceptual logic or machine vision – of AI image-to-video models. In 2025, Project Native released 46 videos under a range of chapter titles, all critiquing the contemporary American domestic landscape and infrastructure – physical, socioeconomic, political, and/or psychological.
Therefore, Project Native is both research and art.
Now in 2026, with Flags, Project Native moves into the marked and shifting terrains of public life—zones claimed, measured, or held in suspension. A timely subject. These works explore how the act of signaling space exposes the pressures shaping the world humans navigate every day.
Flags also mark a change in visual aesthetic: cleaner, more breathing room, a primary palette, and additional geometric abstraction to better invite the AI models to rely on their own rationale for moving the images beyond the keyframe.
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.