THE CURATED LOG XIV
By MITO Universe - @mito.universe
Welcome back to MITO Universe.
We’re living in a timeline where tech evolves faster than taste. Where new tools arrive daily, and entire careers are being built on what’s trending now. But speed doesn’t equal depth. And hype doesn’t build legacy.
At MITO Universe, we’re more interested in what resists acceleration. What lingers. What dares to slow down. The creators we highlight this week share that impulse — not to race ahead, but to craft meaning that holds over time.
In a moment when everything is changing — the tools, the rules, the timelines — we’re still asking the same question: what kind of stories will still matter next year?
This is our answer for now.
SELECTED CREATORS
Selina Yau (aka Novosyna) is a London-based AI artist and creative director crafting visual worlds where stillness becomes spectacle. Her work floats between delicacy and distortion, silk-like palettes, oversized flora, and ceremonial silhouettes rendered through a generative lens.
What sets Novosyna apart is her commitment to restraint. In an era of hyper-slick AI visuals, she leans into softness: hazy transitions, floral repetition, and layered symmetries that evoke a sense of memory rather than spectacle. Her images don’t perform — they haunt, unfolding like half-remembered rituals.
Selina’s background in fashion and creative direction shapes her sensitivity to styling, composition, and emotional charge. The result is work that feels rooted in craftsmanship even when born from code. In 2023, she was awarded Dezeen’s AItopia prize and named one of the top women shaping the future of AI-generated art.
Novosyna’s universe doesn’t scream for attention — it rewards those who stay long enough to notice what’s missing.
Lara Red moves fluidly between physical and digital, using makeup not just as enhancement but as a sculptural tool, a first layer of fiction over reality. Once captured, these portraits are reworked through AI-based retouching, mainly using ComfyUI, revealing a practice where beauty is built, pixel by pixel, with control and intention.
Her imagery is sharp, stylized, almost surreal, yet always rooted in a deep understanding of the human face. Skin is treated like canvas, symmetry becomes choreography, and eyes act as graphic centers of tension.
What sets her apart is not just her technical fluency, but how she uses it to rewrite the codes of beauty. She doesn’t chase realism, she pushes it to its edge, creating visual statements that echo fashion photography, digital art, and character design all at once.
In a moment where AI is often accused of flattening aesthetics, @eleredart proves the opposite: that the human eye, when paired with the right tools, can create new textures of visual authorship.
WHAT’S NEW
Adobe brings Luma’s Ray3 to Firefly (early access, native HDR, Boards).
Firefly now ships Ray3 video generation (~10s clips) with native HDR and seamless iteration in Firefly Boards, synced to Creative Cloud for handoff to Premiere. Exports include Content Credentials, and Adobe says your generations aren’t used to retrain models; there’s also an unlimited Ray3 window for paid plans through Oct 1.
IBC 2025
IBC’s recap centers on task automation, intelligent assistants, agentic AI (“agents directing agents”), transformer-based tooling, noise detection/separation, and AI-driven content discovery—with voices from ITN, Google, WBD and ITV. Useful framing for 2025 roadmaps: modular stacks, human-in-the-loop finishing, and provenance/governance as operational standards.
YouTube Shorts adds Veo 3 Fast — with sound
A custom Veo 3 Fast is live inside the Shorts camera to create ~8s, 480p clips with audio from a prompt, labeled and watermarked via SynthID. Initial rollout covers US/UK/CA/AU/NZ, with adjacent features like Edit with AI (first-draft assembly) previewed for Shorts and YouTube Create.
KEY VISUAL
Paul Octavious is a New England‑Jamaican visual artist and creative director based in Chicago, and co‑founder of Eye Eaters Society. A self‑taught photographer with a background in print and design, he works across photography, videography, graphic design, stop‑motion and experiential content.
His process balances experiment and craft: personal series are revisited with new light, new tech, and a changed eye — not to polish the old, but to let its raw edges speak again.
While we don’t have public evidence that his videos are AI‑generated, his willingness to revisit past work, test lighting, framing, and concept suggests a mindset attuned to iteration — something very close to how many creators now engage with AI tools.
That’s all for now — we’ll be back in your inbox next week.