Pixels, Pulse, and AI Dreams: 7 Students Rewrite the Future of Visual Design

Somewhere between the glow of a screen and the blur of imagination, RED-EYE Metazine and Istituto Marangoni Milano Design brought together a whole class of restless minds and asked them to push, break, and bend the limits of moving image. Out of this collective experiment, seven final works emerged that cut through the noise, video artworks that flicker with the kind of intensity you only get when young creatives collide with technology and decide to rewrite the rules. These are the pieces we’ve chosen to publish, the best of a wave of projects that turned the classroom into a playground of ideas.

At the center of it all was Ced Pakusevskij, the visionary director guiding the lessons. Ced has long argued that there should be no boundary between reality and imagination, because that boundary only exists in our minds. His work is proof of this conviction. Known for fusing art, fashion, and storytelling into visuals that stay burned in your memory, Ced is a tutor and a stunning creative force whose fashion films and campaigns have resonated globally. With more than 30 Promax World Gold Awards to his name, he has become a master at blending sound and image into one seamless experience. For the students, having Ced as a tutor meant being invited to step into a world where narrative is lived through XR visuals.

But the stage itself mattered just as much. Istituto Marangoni Milano Design has built a reputation as an avant-garde school where talent is sharpened through research, experimentation, and an unrelenting push toward digital innovation. It is a place where students are encouraged to challenge convention, blur categories, and create work that feels less like an assignment and more like a manifesto. This collaboration with RED-EYE was a natural extension of that ethos: radical, future-driven, unapologetically experimental.

The brief was deceptively simple: every piece had to be a cocktail of disciplines, stitched together into a story, or maybe just a vibe, that could live and breathe on screen. The catch? Emotion mattered as much as polish. It wasn’t about shiny cameras or perfect renders, it was about how much a short film could haunt you, move you, make you stop scrolling.

What the seven students delivered feels like a digital mixtape for our moment.

Isabella Fernandez de Castro – Chinatown Milano

In Chinatown Milano, Isabella Fernandez de Castro reframes the city through a feverish, surreal lens, zeroing in on Milan’s Chinatown district. The work blends DIY filmmaking, AI-driven visuals, and animation into a chaotic, video game–like dreamscape, fast, glitchy, and restless, much like the experience of living between cultures.

For Isabella, who has relocated many times, Milan is the city that shaped her present identity, and Chinatown became the perfect symbol of chosen belonging. Across the world, Chinatowns embody communities rebuilding home away from home, not just within walls but on an urban scale. Here, that concept mutates into a personal narrative of migration and identity, imagined as if one could “spawn” into a new reality.

The film threads in traditional Chinese aesthetics fashion, makeup, the recurring motif of the snake, nodding to the year of the snake and grounds them with a soundtrack by The Shanghai Restoration Project. The result is both intimate and explosive: a multimedia portrait of a city, an immigrant’s gaze, and the power of AI to reshape how we tell stories about place, culture, and belonging.

Beatrix Johansson – Pearly Whites

In Pearly Whites, Beatrix Johansson dives beneath the surface to reclaim the pearl’s forgotten story. Through a dreamlike sequence of underwater visions, the pearl morphs into jellyfish, diamonds, and ethereal beings, exposing how human culture exploits its beauty for adornment and desire. Rather than polished ornament, Johansson reminds us the pearl is already precious in its natural habitat, mystical, alive, and hidden deep within the ocean. The film reframes value and beauty, shifting focus from human pleasure to the pearl’s own magic.

Yiran Ren – Onitsed

Onitsed by Yiran Ren is an AI-forged love story about time, loss, and the limits of fate. At its core is a girl and an ancient hourglass hidden in her home, an object with the power to send her back into the past. Desperate to save her boyfriend, who died in an accident, she uses it again and again, but every journey only brings her back to the same unchangeable ending.

What she doesn’t see, until it’s too late, is the hidden message inscribed at the bottom of the hourglass: if your current life is already the result of a change, then the past cannot be altered.

Visually poetic and emotionally charged, Onitsed is both a meditation on grief and a reminder that some stories can’t be rewritten, no matter how advanced the technology or how desperate the heart.

Daniela Gaitan – SYN

With SYN, Daniela Gaitan turns music into a place you can walk through. A city street becomes a lucid stage where routine slips into rhythm, and strangers mutate into living album covers. At the core are the SYN glasses, a piece of future tech that transforms reality into a music dream, where every step feels like stepping inside a song. Shot through AI, Cinema 4D, and After Effects, the project collides nostalgia with the now, letting us see and live inside sound itself. SYN is a warped love letter to music, half dream, half city, all pulse.

Emanuele Farella – Alchemy of Stone

Alchemy of Stone by Emanuele Farella is an audiovisual journey inspired by the enigmatic figure of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of San Severo. Suspended between science and magic, history and legend, his life dissolves into a blurred frontier where truth slips into myth. Farella’s video inhabits this liminal space, conjuring images through AI to shape an aesthetic that feels both haunting and weightless. Marble seems to breathe, light reveals what cannot be explained, and the screen becomes a portal into matter and imagination intertwined.

Filippo Rampone – Bàzue

Bàzue by Filippo Rampone is an experimental film created entirely with artificial intelligence, reimagining the Ligurian legend of the witches of Triora. In 1587, women were accused of transforming into black cats to steal from villages, sparking one of the largest Inquisition trials in Italy. But each time a cat reappeared, the cycle of fear and persecution continued, because the cats were only ever cats, and the true enemy was society’s fear of difference.

Rampone brings this myth into the present, staging three witches as enigmatic disruptors who turn the trial against itself, exposing the illusion of control. The film is underscored by Time to Survive, an original techno-glam track produced with Suno AI, electronic, sharp, distorted, visceral. This soundtrack is a queer, ritualistic anthem of survival, designed to live as both film score and streaming track.

In What a Time to Be Alive, Luke Lacey cracks open an alternate reality shaped by one person’s unruly imagination. At its center is Alexis, a protagonist caught in an endless blur of vivid visuals and sensations, unable to tell the difference between her mind and the world around her. Her search for clarity takes her to Kyoto, where the only way out is through, facing the chaos of her visions head-on and surrendering to the fractured reality of Kota Nexo.

The film unfolds as a hybrid of teaser and trailer, a conceptual short that channels the energy of open-world games like Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA VI. A cinematic fever dream with the logic of a glitch, it pushes the boundaries of perception, asking what happens when imagination doesn’t just shape reality but replaces it.

What lingers after these seven short films is technique as much as feelings, like stumbling into the future mid-transmission. Each piece is a remix of myth, memory, and machine; fragments that refuse to sit still, vibrating with the chaos of a generation raised on scrolls and glitches. RED-EYE and Istituto Marangoni Milano Design cracked open a portal, letting the next wave of image-makers hack at reality until it bent into something new.

The result? A reminder that the future of visual culture isn’t coming. It’s already here, raw and unpolished, hiding in plain sight on our screens.

Text by Gloria Maria Cappelletti

Special Thanks to Ced Pakusevskij, all the students and Istituto Marangoni Milano Design

RED•EYE WORLD