LA REPUBBLICA ARTICLE
With AI in Her Hands: Visions and Sounds from the Generative Elsewhere of Melita Radocaj
“AI brings a form of controlled chaos: you guide it, but it always inserts something you didn’t expect. I realized that not only do I accept this unpredictability — I need it.”
by Gloria Maria Cappelletti
Ctrl_cd is the alias under which Melita Radocaj signs her generative experiments, but it is also a statement of intent: to evoke a universe where image and sound merge into a single sensory architecture, driven by an authorial vision. Born in Croatia between the tensions of the countryside and the rhythms of Zagreb, Radocaj has, since childhood, built a dual imagination marked by dichotomies: contemplation and momentum, memory and otherness. Today she lives and works in Munich, where her artistic practice moves between video, music, and artificial intelligence as tools for probing the aesthetics of an emotional and perceptive elsewhere.
With over twenty years of experience in art direction across advertising, cinema and fashion, Radocaj possesses a precise sensitivity for composition, rhythm, and visual language. But what makes her work radically contemporary is her ability to let generative AI and audiovisual storytelling speak together as an expressive extension — avoiding pure stylistic exercise and immediate visual effect. Her works are balanced choreographies of images and sounds that demand time, attention, and immersion in what she herself describes as controlled chaos.
Music has always been a parallel code for Melita. Her deep musical knowledge, nurtured through years of attentive listening and a passion that predates artificial intelligence, now finds a new form through tools like Suno AI, with which she composes the soundtracks for her videos. The result is a coherent audiovisual flow, where each frame has its own sonic counterpoint, each image its own resonance.
For Visioni Artificiali, she presents an original work in which visual selections from her archive intertwine with a musical track she herself composed with AI. Her style — at times cinematic and melancholic — feeds on fashion, pop culture, auteur cinema, and glitch aesthetics. Always shaped through experimental prompts that balance the uncanny and the familiar with the sweep of a choreographic gesture.
Her work has been exhibited at Berlin Fashion Week, the Milano Film Fest 2025, and the inaugural group show at MoAa — Museum of Artificial Art in Florence. Selected for the AIMA AI Master Award 2025, she is part of the Leonardo AI Creator Program and served as a juror at the Berlin Music Video Awards in the categories Best AI and Best Art Direction. Melita Radocaj shapes images and sounds into territories the machine alone could never even intuit — because her work suggests an aesthetics of hybridization where code becomes emotional matter, and the artwork becomes an immersive experience that questions the future of seeing and feeling.
How have your background or the places where you live and work influenced your approach to art and design with AI?
“I grew up in continental Croatia, in that gentle tension between vineyards and the capital — rural rhythms clashing with urban impatience. I wasn’t born on the coast, but the Adriatic has always lived in my imagination: the islands, the open horizon, the promise of an elsewhere. I’ve also always loved rain and snow — those silent climates that invite you to turn inward.
Then, living in London and now in Germany, I learned to move through cultures where tradition and modernity coexist side by side: stone next to glass, history next to reinvention. Crossing these worlds taught me to perceive life as layering: the visible, the implied, the imagined.
This duality — rural and urban, grounded and dreamlike — has become the backdrop of my work. AI is the perfect medium to explore it because it embraces multiplicity. A single prompt can open a hundred possible realities. And somewhere in that spectrum, I find mine.”
How would you describe your artistic style in three words, and how does AI help define it?
“Cinematic. Melancholic. Curious.
AI allows me to expand these qualities until they become immersive environments. I build places that feel like halfway dreams — recognizable, but with their own rules. AI amplifies my instinct.”
What’s the most unexpected thing you discovered about yourself while working with AI?
“That I like uncertainty more than I thought. AI brings a form of controlled chaos: you guide it, but it always inserts something you didn’t foresee. I realized that not only do I accept this unpredictability — I actually need it. It keeps me alert, curious, and creatively restless in the best possible way.
I also discovered how stubborn I can be. When something doesn’t work — and it happens often — I end up in a tunnel, spending hours chasing the version that ‘sounds right.’ It’s exhausting, sometimes nerve-wracking, but that’s where the magic happens. When the image finally arrives, when the machine and I meet in the same vision, that moment feels like an embrace. It reminds me that art isn’t perfection — it’s recognition.”
How do you experience co-creation with AI — is it a partner, a tool, or something else?
“It’s a relationship in motion. Some days it’s a collaborator that sparks ideas at the right moment. Others, it’s a mirror reflecting thoughts I haven’t yet formed. And on quieter days, it’s simply a brush: fast, flexible, obedient.
But more than anything, creating with AI is like daydreaming while awake — a kind of tangible fever. I enter a multiverse where every decision opens new possibilities, and the machine pulls me in and out of different realities. It’s a conversation between intention and interpretation, until together we stumble upon something that feels authentic.”
Which design or fashion trend (past or present) influences your AI creations?
“I’m drawn to the sensual minimalism of contemporary fashion photography: clean lines, architectural silhouettes, colors that speak with confidence. But more than a single trend, it’s the layering of everything I’ve absorbed that shapes me.
I grew up surrounded by magazines like Vogue Italia and AD, where light, composition, posture, and visual tone settled inside me without my noticing. Even when there are no clothes in my images, that influence survives in the way form meets light.”
Where do you find the “raw materials” for your generative art?
“Everywhere. In the way evening light falls on a table, in a sentence overheard on the bus, in the quiet gestures of daily life. But it’s not only the present that nourishes my work — it’s everything I’ve absorbed so far. I draw inspiration from pop culture and high fashion, splatter films and silent-era dramas. Childhood memories, early obsessions, photographs I studied for no reason — all of it has entered my visual flow. AI is just the medium. The real archive is a lived life.”
What’s the boldest experiment you’ve attempted with AI, and how did it go?
“The boldest experiment was exploring explicit eroticism — not as provocation, but as an artistic theme. AI tends to censor intimacy: it’s built to avoid desire, touch, vulnerability. I wanted to push beyond those filters and ask the machine to imagine sensuality rather than repress it.
The result was indeed erotic — openly so — but also surprisingly poetic. Once past the ‘reflex of refusal,’ the system began translating eroticism into symbolic forms: mythical, tactile, almost ritualistic. More than representations of sex, they felt like meditations on desire. That’s when I understood how much beauty exists right at the edge of what AI considers ‘allowed.’”
If your art could speak, what would it say to someone seeing it for the first time?
“It would probably whisper: ‘Take your time.’
Many of my images have hidden layers — emotions inside a color, stories folded into a pose. They invite the viewer to slow down, breathe, let the meaning emerge gradually. That’s how I experience the world.”
What role do you imagine for AI in shaping the future of fashion and design?
“AI will be the great accelerator of imagination. It will allow fashion to prototype faster, explore more radical territories, fuse craftsmanship and computation in an almost alchemical way. But this future depends on how we use it: if we only replicate what already exists, it will remain small. If we let it challenge us, it can open new emotional languages, new textures, new silhouettes.
The soul of creation will remain human. AI can widen the spectrum of what’s possible.”
What’s one misconception about generative art you’d like to dispel?
“That AI creates on its own. It doesn’t.
It responds, but it doesn’t originate.
It’s the artist who decides the tone, intention, emotional rhythm. AI is powerful, but it still takes a human to choose what deserves to come into the world. Authorship remains ours.”