Remote Viewing 06.26-27.26
Video, 2026 · Unique
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About the artwork
Remote Viewing explores how we experience major geopolitical events from far away - in this case the shifting tensions between the U.S. and Iran - watching state actions unfold through screens, news feeds, and chaotic bits of data. These looping videos were built in real time using open-source intelligence, flight tracking, surveillance, and social media fragments collected as the events actually happened. By feeding these completely different types of digital evidence into the AI, the model blends them into visual wholes that bear little apparent resemblance to the actual event.
Caption-like text is added below the images, featuring AI-blended social media posts made by political leaders on both sides of the conflict. This transforms official political language into just another piece of digital evidence, and sets up a dialectic within the imagery between political rhetoric and events on the ground. Taken together, these videos highlight a parallel between human and machine perception, showing how both people and AI constantly try to stitch together a complete, coherent story from messy, incomplete and/or contradictory information.
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.