November 22, 2025

Cartographies of the invisible — an exclusive interview with 0nastiia

INTERVIEW WITH AI ARTIST 0NASTIIA

BY VERTIGINI STUDIO

Some artists carry an inner landscape that refuses to be neatly charted. It moves like a living substance—shifting, flickering—built from unpredictable light, frayed memories, and figures that surface from a place suspended between dream and return. In this conversation, O.N. opens a rare threshold: a glimpse into a creative process shaped by encounters with one’s own shadows, quiet versions of the self, and the unexpected clarity that appears when control is gently released.

Her practice unfolds in a porous territory where sincerity becomes a fragile material to protect, light behaves like a restless collaborator, and the gesture of drawing meets artificial intelligence as an intuitive extension of memory. The interview moves in circles rather than lines: returning to fragments, to images that resist containment, to characters that shift form like small mythologies.

What emerges is not just a reflection on making art, but a meditation on time, absence, and the strangely liberating impossibility of holding onto what insists on staying wild.

VS What has been the most unexpected encounter that changed the way you

see and construct your visual world?

0N The most unexpected encounter was probably meeting myself, my fears,

forgotten memories, and the quiet versions of who I used to be. Learning to

face those parts and use them in my art changed everything. It made my visual

world more personal, more uncertain, but also more alive.

VS Within this ecosystem, which element feels the most delicate to protect and

which one keeps mutating against all your expectations?

0N The most delicate element is sincerity. It can easily disappear under layers of

style or digital polish. What keeps mutating is light it always behaves

differently than I expect, shifting the emotion of a scene in unpredictable ways.

VS There is an image on your profile that seems to escape any form of control.

What made that image impossible to contain, and why did you decide to

release it anyway?

0N Some images resist structure, they feel alive, like they decide for themselves

when they’re finished. That particular image carried a strange emotional charge

I couldn’t fully explain, and that’s why I let it go. Sometimes imperfection feels

closer to truth.

VS What are your hidden rituals those almost invisible movements without

which no work of yours could be born?

0N Lately, I’ve shifted toward creating AI works based on my own real drawings. My

process now starts with an unconscious sketch, I simply take a piece of paper

and begin to draw, without thinking. It usually happens at night, when the

boundary between thought and intuition becomes thin, and I can let something

unexpected appear.

VS Where does this search between presence and absence originate for you,

and how does it shape the way you experience time?

0N I think it comes from memory, how we remember things not as full moments but

as fragments, flashes, textures. My sense of time is fluid; I see it as circular

rather than linear. Every project is like revisiting a place I’ve never been.

VS If you could interview one of your symbols a color, a fragment, a recurring

element, which would you choose, and what secrets would it reveal?

0N I would choose the color grey. It’s often overlooked, but for me, it holds both

melancholy and serenity. Grey is where contradictions coexist, it’s the pause

between emotion and reason.

VS When was the moment an image of yours, seen by someone far away, gave

you an unexpected new reading of your own work?

0N Once, someone from another country described one of my videos as “a

memory of a city that never existed.” That sentence stayed with me. It made me

see my work not as storytelling but as collective dreaming.

VS If your entire archive disappeared and you could save only one fragment,

which image would you recreate immediately?

0N I would save one of my recent works a portrait of a strange character with a

colorful nose named Noen. I love his transformations; he became the starting

point for my new series based on my drawings. I like this new direction maybe

it’s an illusion, but it feels as if it gives more value to AI generated art. We’ll see

where it leads next.