sanctum sanctorum
Video, 2025
About the artwork
A doll-like figure lies in the grass, its breath slow, eyes flickering open and shut as cascading streams of code flicker behind it. The scene is quiet yet unsettling — evoking a body both human and artificial, suspended between rest and awakening, between the natural world and a manufactured consciousness.
This video is part of an ongoing series, Codex Machina, that processes cycles of hardship, conflict, and mythology through the fractured lens of history and the AI age. A meditation on memory, suffering, and the blurred line between the sacred and the synthetic, the series evokes the compositions and allegories of medieval and Renaissance painting. It reflects both personal challenges with physical fragility and the mounting crises of global conflict and encroaching fascism in the present, while merging digital artifacts with the weight of history. Each vignette captures a liminal space where these forces variously converge, inviting the viewer to question the evolving roles of struggle, agency, and wisdom in an age of artificial intelligence.
As part of my ongoing exploration of surreal hauntings and fragile realities, Codex Machina extends the thematic core of my work. Across past collections, I have conjured liminal spaces where history refuses to stay buried, where myths, conflicts, and personal reckonings resurface as spectral echoes. Whether through uncanny dolls, mythic figures, or AI-generated landscapes, my work interrogates cycles of torment, resilience, and transformation. Codex Machina leans into this eerie convergence, allowing the discomfort of these entanglements to surface rather than resolve. It is as much a searching inquiry as it is a meditation—hovering between the mechanical and the human, the coded and the sacred, the forgotten and the ever-returning.
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.