KEZIAI
Dance, Regardless — The Sixth Step —
Still - Step 1: Did You Not Know
Dance, Regardless — The Sixth Step —
KEZIAI
A PORTRAIT OF A LIFE THAT KEPT GOING.
Dance, Regardless is the next movement after Dance Interrupted (Daily.xyz Fellowship, 2024).
This work emerges from a year of rupture — loss, grief, heartbreak, and a body rewritten by major surgery — and follows the moment where movement and hope return. Some people talk about a “sixth stage” of grief: the stage beyond acceptance, where you learn how to live with the fracture, to build meaning out of interruption. A body stitched back into itself. Tracing how a life continues, transcends, how a self re-forms as joy emerges in new shapes and rhythms.
Dance, Regardless — The Sixth Step — | Stills - Step 1: Did You Not Know, Step 2: Dreams They Never Break, Step 3: Stardust, Step 4: Goodbye Old Friend, Goodbye, Step 5: Faded-Memories, Step 6: Like a Rothko Painting
Dancers smear through time, colour sliding off them,
echoing the painterly mood of Like a Rothko Painting.
Dance, Regardless — The Sixth Step —
Each work created in-cAImera, as one continuous take.
Created during a period of illness when traditional production was impossible, Dance, Regardless uses AI as a means of translating lived feeling directly into moving image — an enabling way of working from within limitation rather than outside it.
Still - Step 2: Dreams They Never Break
The work unfolds in a porous, liminal space where AI is responsive and emotionally attuned — an intimate, affect-led use of AI oriented toward sensation, emotion, and lived temporality — and where unstable bodies meet technology, with tenderness and human gesture remaining central.
Shaped by a collective, unstable moment we all share — where continuity and break coexist in a paradox of instability and persistence — the work holds presence and considers what remains human as time moves forward, regardless.
Still - Step 3: Stardust
Movement dissolves and reassembles; gestures echo and decay through temporal slippage, evoking memory and fragility. Emotion is held as a present condition rather than a resolved narrative.
While born from personal rupture, the six-part series invites recognition across grief, adaptation, and endurance, allowing others to recognise their own experiences.
Still - Step 4: Goodbye Old Friend, Goodbye
Each work was created in-cAImera as a single, continuous take using Deforum — no cuts. The technique was developed through sustained experimentation with time-based modulation, evolving prompts, and bespoke parameter settings to shape emotional tone and atmosphere over time. This enables an immediate, embodied, painterly mode of making where images emerge directly from feeling.
Still - Step 5: Faded Memories
Alpha masks interrupt the dancers as they move through the frame, allowing bodies to drift, dissolve, and reassemble organically. Music was generated using Suno AI, composed during states of grief and heartbreak, co-evolving with the visuals.
Still - Step 6: Like a Rothko Painting
KEZIAI is a New Zealand / British Intermedia artist, photographer, and director fusing nearly 30 years of filmmaking with AI. Her cinematic work has screened at BAFTA and OSCAR-accredited festivals, and her AI art has been exhibited globally from Saatchi Gallery London to the stratosphere. She creates surreal and metaphorical worlds.
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· ART FOR THE END OF THE WORLD ·
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Kezia Barnett, aka KEZIAI, is a New Zealand–British Intermedia artist and filmmaker moving between cinematic storytelling, conceptual art, and technology. Fusing nearly 30 years of filmmaking with AI, KEZIAI creates metaphorical worlds exploring emotional, social, and technological thresholds — with AI as a creative accelerator, a pseudo film set and speculative collaborator.
Raised in Devonport, New Zealand, Kezia is propelled by curiosity and imagination. With creative ingenuity and a sharp eye for both detail and the conceptual idea, she creates with bleeding-edge technology and has an instinct for the zeitgeist.
Living with chronic illness, KEZIAI creates surreal scenes from bed. Her AI-infused artworks do the travelling for her.
From 2022, KEZIAI has been deeply immersed in the world of AI — experimenting, learning, and creating. Curated by Claire Silver, her work has been exhibited with Superchief in Seoul and Miami, and shown at PIVOTAL: Digitalism at the British Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery London, LUME Studios NYC, Craiova Art Museum Romania, Casa Nua Gallery São Paulo, Cineteca de Nuevo León Mexico, Mecenate Fine Art Gallery Rome, kHaus Basel, Goat Gallery Toronto, Seattle NFT Museum, Times Square — even in the stratosphere. At Saatchi, her ‘Deserted Realities’ series transformed personal narratives into dystopian future landscapes — works haunted by isolation, pain, and resilience, mirroring the state of the world while dancing through it. Her work has been featured on daily.xyz, an ecosystem connecting AI artists with collectors and bridging the gap between traditional art and the digital frontier.
She has also worked as AI consultant and AI artist on McDonald’s commercials with The Gardening Club and is represented by Honor Society.
Her cinematic work has screened at BAFTA-qualifying and OSCAR-accredited festivals, earning accolades including Golds at the Asia Pacific Advertising Festival, D&AD, The One Show, and AWARD, as well as nominations at Cannes Lions. As a commercials director, she travelled the globe directing for brands including HSBC, Mastercard, Ponds, and Cadbury.
Since 1997, she has documented her life through a daily self-portrait — a long-term living archive. You could call it endurance art.
BFA majoring in Intermedia from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, in the 90s.
X Spaces Host, Art & Vault.