GROWING UP

A visual chronicle of draconic metamorphosis that traces the complete lifecycle from fragile egg to fully realized, paired creature. Growing up in Italy, for me "chimera" always meant an illusory condition or destination that people dream of and chase, even when they lack the means to achieve it—like a blinding desire unaware of actual context. While experimenting with video inpainting, which should rely on proper context for its designed functioning, I naturally began building text prompts around this mythical creature: an unleashed being caught between abomination and myth. By misusing the interface—selecting the entire canvas to be inpainted instead of specific areas—I discovered something unexpected. Without any usable visual context to guide it, the system began unveiling previously hidden latent spaces that were surprisingly coherent and hyper-detailed. Pushing Pika 1.0 beyond its designed parameters exposes a specific visual pattern unique to this stress condition—the distinctive way this particular model reconstructs reality when stripped of its contextual anchors. My focus on proprietary video models stems from a sense of urgency. These commercial systems are fragile and ephemeral, subject to corporate decisions about availability and updates. They can disappear entirely as AI technology evolves toward standardization, taking their unique visual signatures with them. CHIMERA becomes both my subject and my method—an impossible creature born from impossible technical conditions, perfectly representing the fleeting nature of these early AI systems themselves. AI generated soundtrack by Riccardo Silano Additional sfx arranged and manipulated by Riccardo Silano