SPECIMEN OF SURVIVAL — Digital Iteration

for The Wrong Biennale 2025–2026, Code Error Pavilion

Curated by Julia Sysalova

This project began in a rush. We had three days to put everything together for The Wrong Biennale.

Julia wrote to all of us asking for digital works, and I had no experience with AI video models. I didn’t know what I wanted to create or how to even approach it. But I knew my underwater photographs already explored fragility, pressure and adaptation, which aligned with the theme of Code Error.

So I tried. I fed the images into the machine and expected them to behave. They didn’t. The AI struggled, miscalculated and created strange, broken bodies.

That failure eventually became the heart of the work.

In this digital iteration of the Specimen of Survival series, the image of the body underwater is subjected to AI’s attempt to transform and repeat it. In the process, the machine fails: limbs fracture, proportions collapse, and physics are ignored.

These algorithmic distortions reveal the fragility of survival itself. Survival is not a heroic act, it is something unstable, provisional, and constantly threatened with dissolution.

 
the moment I stopped resisting...

The video is based on four photographs of a body underwater wrapped in survival blankets. Being underwater is uncomfortable: it is cold, disorienting, physically heavy and hard to control.

These four images were selected from more than 500 photographs. They worked only because the body eventually stopped fighting the water long enough to settle. They became the four moments of stability and calm in a very unstable environment.

Everything that happens between these images was left to AI. The machine attempts to predict the transitions and gets them wrong, revealing how unstable adaptation can be.

The machine tries to construct a smooth evolution. Even when the images are visually similar, transitions that a human mind can easily imagine, the AI still collapses. It struggles with joints, angles, depth and perspective. The body stretches in impossible directions, as though the environment itself refuses to settle.

AI stops being a tool and becomes the environment. Its mistakes reveal how fragile adaptation really is and how much we depend on stability to survive.

Four still points. Everything in between is the struggle

Survival is never a solitary act; it is a negotiation with the environment that both sustains and threatens to destroy you To survive is to find fleeting points of adaptation in an unstable world, even when those strategies quickly lose their relevance. The moment the environment changes, your habits, coping mechanisms, and protections, aka your survival blankets, stop working. This endless recalibration becomes a prelude to mutation: a necessary shift of form, perception, or identity in order to endure.

Click here to discover the project.

Curated by Julia Sysalova.

Participating artists:
Nelya Akimova, Oxana Akopov, Consonance Ebb, Svetlana Fenster, Julia Flit, Ksenia Mazheyko, Liora Redman, Alena Rezanova, Veera Romanoff, Elisaveta Sivas, Ghala Vasylenko and Viktor Vinichenko.

The pavilion explores error as a natural form of life, mutation as a form of evolution and breakdown as a form of freedom.

ERROR

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ERROR 〰️

I didn’t like the piece when I first made it.
Maybe because I didn’t feel in control.
Maybe because the AI exposed things I wasn’t expecting.

After some time, I realised this work wasn’t supposed to be clean or perfect. It needed to unravel. It needed to show instability in the image, in the machine, and in me.

This was my first attempt at working with AI, a technology I barely understood at the time. Looking back, the uncertainty and vulnerability of that moment feel right for Code Error.

Sometimes error is simply another form of honesty.