Rend
Video, 2025
About the artwork
Rend and Yield form a diptych examining rupture and response within the contemporary American domestic landscape. In Rend, structures give way under pressure, revealing fractures in both architecture and memory. Yield descends into the strata beneath these ruptures, where matter compresses, settles, and reorganizes into new forms.
Rend opens the diptych with a quiet but inexorable collapse. Flooded streets, faltering machinery, and misplaced domestic objects form a landscape where rupture feels both inevitable and intimate. AI-driven distortions pull the familiar into unfamiliar states, revealing the moment where stability gives way. In this world, demolition is not spectacle but the slow unthreading of a life—architectural, emotional, and inherited. The work becomes a portrait of collapse as seen from inside a computational eye.
Rend is part of Project Native, in which specific visual conditions invite AI image-to-video models to express themselves, unprompted, according to their own perceptual logic, and then harvests and classifies the resultant native gestures. This diptych expands the project from its initial faulty topographies theme into a more psychological register of precarity—closing the distance with the viewer—where AI perception becomes a medium for exploring domestic vulnerability, collapse, and the pressures that shape interior life. Echoing Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of interior space and Lauren Berlant’s writing on precarity, the works reveal collapse not as an event but as a “lived condition”—unfolding simultaneously across domestic, emotional, infrastructural, and computational strata.
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.