Signal Flag 010
Video, 2026 · Unique
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About the artwork
Signal Flags is a series of short AI video works created from Jan 24-Feb 7, 2026 in response to specific moments of citizen expression and state presence during events in Minneapolis. The pieces translate tension and instability into visual signals that reminded me of maritime signal flags. Rather than documenting events directly, each work functions as a kind of coded transmission—an interpretation of the atmosphere surrounding a particular event or day or sequence of days. The focus is on alertness and the feeling that something in the everyday has shifted, using a visual language that is both direct and symbolic.
This Signal Flags series is part of Remote Viewing, a new ongoing collection that looks at how geopolitical events are experienced at a distance. Across the collection, I act as an observer interpreting signals from afar, creating visual responses that register the emotional and atmospheric conditions of unfolding events.
Developed alongside an evolving investigation of AI visual logic, these works draw on an understanding of how AI models respond to image, pattern, and signal, therefore allowing machine perception to participate in translating lived experience into visual form.
Sound design by the artist.
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.