By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)
When Prototype appeared online, it did not look like a music video.
It looked like a manifesto.
At the centre of it was Viktoria Modesta, a multidisciplinary artist working across music, performance, fashion and emerging technology, poised in sculptural silhouettes with a crystal spike prosthetic cutting through the frame like a piece of couture armour.
What the world often frames as disability suddenly read differently. Precision. Power. Design.
For many viewers, it was the first time prosthetics had been presented not as something to conceal, but as something to style. The body itself became the canvas.
Long before Prototype entered the cultural bloodstream, Modesta had already spent years navigating the medical system after a childhood accident left her with a severely injured leg. Surgeries defined much of her youth. As an adult, she made a decision that would reshape everything that followed: a voluntary below-the-knee amputation that allowed her to reclaim mobility and control over her body.
That decision ultimately reshaped her work.
Rather than treating prosthetics purely as medical devices, Modesta approached them as objects of design. Collaborations with experimental designers and engineers soon followed, resulting in prosthetics that resembled sculptural fashion pieces as much as functional limbs. Spikes, mirrored surfaces and futuristic silhouettes turned the prosthetic into a centrepiece rather than something hidden beneath clothing.
Fashion, in Modesta’s world, is not decoration. It is infrastructure. A language through which the body can be rewritten.
More than a decade after Prototype, that instinct to rethink the body continues with Metabodies.AI, her latest body of work imagining new forms of human embodiment. Where Prototype hinted at a new visual language around the body, Metabodies pushes the conversation further, asking what happens when the body itself becomes a site of constant reinvention.
In this conversation with Couture Troopers, Modesta reflects on how her lived experience shaped her creative philosophy, why fashion became the most natural vocabulary for her work, and how Metabodies continues the cultural conversation she began years ago.
Your work has always challenged conventional ideas of the body, identity, and performance, from the Prototype video to Metabodies.AI. How has your experience with limb difference shaped your creative vision and approach to fashion, music, and technology?
VM: It has become a portal for my imagination in many ways, pushing me to approach dressing and empowering the body from a multidisciplinary perspective.
The challenges I faced with my leg led me to invent strategies for ‘artful survival’, fuelling my ongoing experimentation and visual research.”
But it has also prompted me to ask profound questions: Where do ‘I’ begin and end? How do artificial interventions and new environments shape my identity?
You use your body as a canvas, a medium, and a narrative tool. How do you see this approach influencing the stories you tell through both physical and digital performance?
VM: I entered the future human design space through fashion and performance art, aiming to creatively address real body and identity challenges.
My firsthand experiences with technological augmentation and biological constraints led me to a sci-fi IRL aesthetic, allowing me to visualise new configurations of human design and performance.
Unintentionally, I created a body of work that centres embodiment in human-machine evolution.
Music, fashion, and technology intersect in your work in unique ways. How does your embodiment inform how you blend these disciplines?
VM: Shifting between seeing the body as an interface, a sculpture, and a site of protest has given me many angles from which to incorporate every artistic medium. Whether it is a song, a performance, a prosthetic design, or an AI visual, the process of bridging disciplines is often effortless. Nothing is off-limits if it is telling a story.
There is a compulsion that often originates from a physical experience. That snapshot of an emotion produces a clear calling for a medium and a desire to send an echo across culture.
The tools we are developing amplify human expression in new ways. It is one of many reasons why I am always experimenting with the latest thing. We shape our tools, then the tools shape us.
Metabodies.AI transforms bodies into digital experiences. How did the project originate, and what possibilities does it open for exploring identity, physicality, and movement beyond traditional performance?
VM: Just over four years ago, I conducted some of my most advanced R&D: bionic experiments in microgravity with the Aurelia Institute and an avatar installation at Crystal Bridges Museum. That is when I first started learning visual AI software.
When I discovered I could scale my design experiments, which usually require support from brands, institutions, and large budgets, it felt like a real breakthrough. I knew right away this was an AI case study with real cultural benefits. But before I began seeing results, I first had to develop my own method for pushing the datasets to give me less predictable results. I learned early about the limits of ‘learning systems’ knowledge and permission blocks that prevented more nuanced human beings’ physicality from being explored.
It was an interesting challenge that touched on ethics and on how we are still learning to deal with the full range of bodies. Eventually, I stopped relying on prompts and adopted an evolutionary approach to encourage certain design qualities of the image to be replicated, and I began seeing images of fictional humans in extraordinary, futuristic environments that felt like the images I wanted to see exist in pop culture. It made me think about the people missing from our future visual mood boards. People of different ages, ethnicities, abilities, and body types. I saw firsthand that AI can be a catalyst for democratising imagination.
Who imagines, creates, and narrates the future human vision? Can this type of artwork restore the blind spots in our culture? At a time when anything can be generated, who makes it and why matters now more than ever.
A few years later, during the hardest periods of my life, I was healing from multiple surgeries and pausing everything while my body rebuilt itself. I began a series of self-portraits titled Body Log. I trained algorithms on myself as a character, along with the design aesthetic I had developed earlier. I felt my will being released from my suffering body through those fragmented, deconstructed images. It echoed the making of Prototype. Making art was the only way out, like my life depended on it.
The first social media preview of the work attracted significant attention, along with strong reactions and some fear. I realised context is important. To me, this is not an aesthetic, but a foundation for designing new forms of embodiment.
What stood out was the response from people who use medical devices, such as actress and model Jillian Mercado, who asked how she could become part of this movement.”
That response was everything. It inspired me to create more portraits of people like the next-gen bionic muse, Tilly Lockey. For the first time, I was able to redefine someone else’s body.
While creating thousands of iterations in search of a perfect mutation, sometimes an image appears that feels like a familiar face in the crowd. A knowing that words cannot express. A truth emerges that feels significant. This is the most unique aspect of working with AI visuals. An intimate moment that does not involve anyone else, but draws from the aspirations and visions of many embedded in the models.
Twenty years ago, I turned to music because it allowed me to bring together production, design, and theatrical moments with my audience. I find myself in a similar mindset now, setting the stage for a clear vantage point on the future human paradigm, where the full spectrum of embodiment is explored.
You showcased Metabodies.AI in Athens last April. How did the audience respond, and did their engagement influence how you think about body representation and digital performance?
VM: It was moving to see the images from my computer projected onto the wall for a real-life audience.
But it also felt incomplete. The project is entering a phase of public integration, and finding the right exhibitions, publications, and opportunities to fully explore and share the work has become essential.
The images serve as provocations and underpin broader philosophical questions and long-term thinking about how art can help us understand the current world.
I believe a counterculture is emerging from the emptiness and despair of our everyday technological experiences. One that places the body, mind, spirit, and human will at the centre of machine-human evolution.
Since then, the project has been receiving a steady stream of interest, and things are beginning to accelerate.
Collaboration with technologists, coders, and visual artists is central to Metabodies.AI. How did these partnerships help translate your vision while reflecting your personal embodiment?
VM: I draw on experiences from my past collaborations, specifically those with Alternative Limb Project and Anouk Wipprecht, Koleman Prosthetics, United Nude, and many more. Times when we put a custom Tesla coil into my shoes, 3D-printed garments that constricted my body, prosthetics shaped like a spike, music sensors in my clothes and shoes, and flexible, articulated limbs that float in zero gravity. I bring a piece of wisdom from every real-world inventor and collaborator with me into my virtual atelier. It is a project that simply could not have been possible five years ago.
This is where the medical field and space have an advantage. Every project is human-centred, with the intention of safeguarding, healing, protecting, or empowering the human body. I find that this intention really matters. It is the seed that grows into a meaningful outcome.”
Bringing a cultural lens to those industries and experiments has been one of the most fulfilling times in my life.
The echo chamber of commercial fashion, art, and music needs more risky actors who do not subscribe to the flattening algorithm of demand.
Your projects combine bold, conceptual aesthetics with accessible storytelling. How do you balance experimentation with audience engagement, especially around topics of the body and identity?
VM: I attribute the balance to seeing style and function as each wing of one bird.
I stick to my lived truth, which keeps things grounded. Creating and making connections from firsthand experience, rather than theorising, grounds the work. My internal orientation has always been full of compassion, a desire for justice, curiosity, and optimism, and all of that exists against the backdrop of my formative years during the Soviet hospital period and an alternative subculture in London during my teens.
I have had an extreme life, and I have always been curious about extreme characters and practices, and what drives people to live differently and not conform.
Early on, I chose the stance that imagination is the strongest weapon against reality, and transforming reality requires both strength and force. That sentiment consistently inspires me to deliver a message of hope and optimism through impact, not comfort.
How has Metabodies.AI influenced your other artistic or musical projects, and how does it continue the conversation you started with Prototype?
VM: Prototype was a blueprint for post-disability culture, for pop culture disruption, for body evolution and revolution that shifted the narratives in art, beauty, fashion, music, and technology.
Since then, I have explored every human frontier with urgency, seeking to manifest my belief that an embodied, diverse, creative, and integrative reality is not a cultural anomaly but a cultural current here to stay.
I am not alone in that vision. Metabodies is the proof of concept that my artful survival approach can serve as a blueprint to inform culture, design practices, education, philosophy, and even policy.”
I worked relentlessly for many years, operating in fight-or-flight mode, and I am only now stepping out of that state with a greater capacity to work beyond my image. My focus is on translating these lessons into something tangible, while continuing to explore new artistic tools and collaborations, and supporting the emergence of a broader community.
I know that a simpler time is coming, where I will spend more time working with my voice and movement, with less need for art activism. But for now, there is still important work to be done.
Looking ahead, are there new platforms, cities, or collaborations where you want to expand Metabodies.AI or explore further intersections of body, technology, and performance?
VM: The Metabodies project is growing into a large container for my visual atlas of AI research and a philosophical framework, and will soon extend into a live event.
I am developing a series of essays, international fellowships, and multiple arts and technology collaborations aimed at testing and expanding the thesis, and building enough momentum for a real-world experience that can fully translate the intention behind the project.
I love a collective lens that once existed during the formation of the Olympic movement, when music, art, and poetry were considered core expressions of human excellence. With Metabodies, I aim to bring this paradigm back, updated with contemporary research, practices, and tools.
In Metabodies.AI, Viktoria Modesta inhabits new configurations of the future body | Image: Courtesy of Viktoria Modesta
Finally, what do you hope audiences take away from your artistic journey in terms of empowerment, rethinking the body, or experiencing fashion and performance in new ways?
VM: I hope my work waters the seed of their personal power. I hope my artful survival dampens the fear of the future, because intention matters more than the tools we create. A creative practice is not limited to museums and concert halls; for me, it is a skillful application of imagination to human life, and the domains we are exploring collectively belong to everyone.
