Dr. Irina Raicu.

Creative practice · Art

Machine vision, climate, memory.

Image series where old visual systems meet new machines. Here, the environment stops behaving like a backdrop.

Selected bodies of work

Three lines of enquiry.

Body 01

The Future of the Past

CVPR Art Gallery · 2024

Cultural memory rebuilt by computation. The series works through historical image systems, portraiture, history painting, civic architecture, and asks what a machine keeps when it is trained to remember them.

AI agents are part of the making, not the author. What they omit is as much the subject as what they render.

A figure in ornate ceremonial dress standing on a bridge before a domed classical city

Plate 01

A revolutionary crowd surging beneath the Arc de Triomphe, rendered as a history painting
Plate 02
A figure crowned with palace architecture standing before a domed civic building
Plate 03
A figure riding a patterned horse through a carved stone arcade
Plate 04
A figure in a black and gold structured collar between classical columns
Plate 05
A figure in a printed gown among marble statues before a mountain range
Plate 06
A classical painted face emerging from a fractured wooden panel
Plate 07

Body 02

Climate Futures

A sequence that moves from familiar landscape, through environmental rupture, to nature reclaiming architecture, and finally to speculative rebirth. Drowned cities, flooded interiors, and growth returning through the built world.

Drawn from Aftermath: The Rebirth, Faces of a New World, Preserving Beauty: A Renaissance in Peril, and Forgotten Nature and Captivity.

A city skyline overtaken by dense coral-like blossom, a tower visible through the growth

Plate 01

A forest interior opening onto suspended landscape portals, roots crossing a flooded floor
Plate 02
A figure in a visor standing in a melting arctic landscape strewn with debris
Plate 03
A figure submerged to the waist in still water beside collapsing machinery
Plate 04
A woman above her own reflection in flooded water, a drowned city behind her
Plate 05
A framed underwater scene installed on a gallery wall
Plate 06

Body 03

Machine Vision / Becoming

Identity, authorship, embodiment and transformation. The hybrid body as a site where machine perception and self-construction meet.

Includes work from The Cross of Change and She Who Codes Herself. This is not the commercial fashion practice; the subject here is the body being read, not the garment being sold.

A pale hybrid figure encrusted with jewels and coral, holding a small glass vial

Plate 01

A pale hybrid figure crowned with blossoms and circuitry
Plate 02
A figure wrapped in translucent tubing against a submerged green interior
Plate 03
A figure in a filigree mask drawing threads of light across a gilded room
Plate 04
A figure with a mechanical arm seated in a baroque interior
Plate 05
A figure carrying a city of towers as headdress before a river bridge
Plate 06

Artist statement

My practice examines what machines inherit when they learn to see: our images of nature, bodies, history and desire. Working with generative systems, custom AI agents, moving image and participatory interfaces, I build speculative worlds in which climate pressure disrupts familiar landscapes and cultural memory is reconstructed by computation.

I treat artificial intelligence not as an autonomous author, but as a material, one that exposes patterns, distortions and omissions in the data we ask it to remember. Across image series, films and installations, the work moves between beauty and unease: drowned cities, hybrid bodies, reconstructed heritage and brain signals translated into images.

I am interested in the moment an artificial image stops functioning as spectacle and becomes evidence: of what we preserve, what we misrecognize and what we may lose.

Selected research

Where the practice is experimental.

Project A

FolkLORA

Andrei Ivănescu, Virgil Ilian and Irina Raicu

CVPR Art Gallery · 2026

A collaborative project working with Romanian cultural memory and curated heritage datasets.

  • Curated heritage datasets drawn from Romanian material culture
  • LoRA models trained on that material
  • Synthetic imagery set against authentic record
  • Inverse authentication as a method
  • The decision not to generate certain cultural material

Project B

AI Mind Connected

Research concept · participatory installation in development

A brain-computer interface work in which signal-derived input drives real-time image making. A neural headset provides signals, those signals are interpreted into semantic prompts, and an Artist Agent generates artwork live, on the subject of climate change.

A second loop opens the system to the room: participants contribute their own signal, and the resulting images accumulate into a collective visual archive.

Neural headset
Brain signals
Semantic interpretation
Artist Agent
Live artwork
Participant
Signal contribution
Collective visual archive

The system interprets signal-derived inputs; it does not claim to reproduce private thought literally.

Exhibitions and record

Where the work has been shown.

Exhibitions only. Awards, press, speaking and brand collaborations are recorded separately.

Artist dossier

Materials for curators.

  • Artist statementAvailable on request
  • Selected worksAvailable on request
  • Exhibitions and CVAvailable on request
  • High-resolution images and press assetsAvailable on request

Request the artist dossier

Availability

Available for exhibitions, editorial commissions, institutional partnerships and selected print licensing.