Deities and Oddities. is the first fully physical chapter of Maria Lankina’s AI practice. Each image begins with an existing analog work from her studio, often a large acrylic painting from series such as Archetypes on Quiet Ground or Life’s Harmonics. A photograph of that painting is fed into an early generative app, along with a short textual incantation. The app was never really meant to be used this way, but Lankina treats the painting itself as the prompt: a dense field of cues for the model to misread.
What comes back are glitchy, half excavated figures. Limbs misalign, faces smear, surfaces look scraped open rather than finished. Instead of keeping those digital artifacts as files, she sends them straight to an instant printer and outputs them on Polaroid and Fujifilm Instax film. The chemistry, lenses and paper smooth some of the violence, tinting the images with soft pastels and light leaks, but the wrongness never disappears. Analog painting becomes digital hallucination, which becomes instant film print, still technically digital yet bound to a small vulnerable object that can crease, fade or be lost.
Prompts such as “God is a woman. Freckles. Bare skin. Linen. Crack in plaster. Love over death.” act as verbal spells riding on top of the image input. Across the series, figures sit in improvised thrones, collapse against peach walls or stare back with the flat calm of avatars who have seen the whole dataset. They feel like priestesses, understudies and malfunctioning idols of the data sublime: divine prototypes generated by software, then pinned to the real through cheap paper and chemistry. Deities and Oddities. marks the point where Lankina’s mythohuman universe first exits the screen and insists on being held.
