Broken Simulations: Nikita Diakur's Chaos Engine

By @JustinWetch

Nikita Diakur was born in Moscow and spent his early childhood in a Russia that was falling apart. The nineties were rough. Perestroika was happening, and the basic things weren't there. His parents watched the country unravel and made a decision: they would leave. In 1992, the family moved to Germany. Part of the reason was opportunity. Part of it was keeping their son out of the Chechen War draft.

"It's not the best military to go to," Nikita says.

In Germany, he grew up with ambitions that had nothing to do with art. At ten or eleven he wanted to be a wrestler. Then a basketball player. When art eventually surfaced as a possibility, he dismissed it. He considered business, architecture, the typical paths that promise stability. But his father saw something and convinced him to try a foundation arts course in the UK, a low-pressure year that introduces you to creative work without demanding commitment.

It was a good starting point. Nikita did three years of graphic design at Central Saint Martins, then a master's in animation at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2009. By then he had the training, but not the experience he needed.

After graduation, Nikita assumed he'd need to take commissions and client work to survive. He spent nearly a decade doing exactly that, making other people's projects while his own ideas waited. Nine years passed before he finally figured out that he could just do his own work without relying on jobs.

"It's a struggle," he says, "but I think it's a worthy struggle."

The student years had prepared him for difficulty. For his graduation film, the school built him a massive render server with about twenty computers, and he had to manage each one manually. He sat in the basement trying to render the film, running against walls, learning that animation at this level meant solving problems nobody could solve for you.

When he moved back to Germany, he didn't start working on what would become his breakthrough film, Ugly, until four years in. Then it took another four years to finish. In that time, his style developed slowly, through experimentation and failure, through trying to find what he calls "the most appealing ugly aesthetic" for the story he wanted to tell.

Nikita describes his work as "broken simulations," and the phrase captures something essential. He leaves the raw elements of the process visible in the final product. The wireframes of the 3D models, the marionette interface, the artifacts of the simulation itself. When you want to be honest about the origins, he says, it feels natural to leave the origins in.

He discovered early that you cannot force humor in animation. If you try too hard to be funny, it becomes cringe. You need to be a super good comedian to pull it off, and he's not. So he found another way. Instead of imposing jokes, he builds environments where interesting or funny things can happen on their own. He sets up scenarios and then plays within them, capturing whatever emerges.

A character programmed to struggle with balance might knock over a cup. If the cup topples in a surprising way with a nice sound, that unplanned moment becomes part of the animation. If nothing interesting happens, nothing happens. The solution, he realized, was not to be in control.

"When you try to control it too much, when you try to impose your own will onto something, then it can be very stale, very static, very boring," Nikita says. "I try to avoid that."

He treats the digital puppets in his simulations like actors or collaborators rather than objects to command. When he's working alone at his computer, he imagines them as friends, as part of the team. He's a film director, even though he's just an animator sitting by himself in front of a screen.

Ugly is based on a story about a cat so hideous that an entire neighborhood mistreats it. The source material is cruel and sentimental, what Nikita calls "very cheesy, very kitsch." But underneath the melodrama is something real: a story about being ostracized for how you look, about cruelty and its consequences.

He tried at first to make it funny. Wrong approach. The story, even though it's cheesy, is pure. It addresses something important. Forcing comedy onto it felt false.

So he pivoted. He decided to use his glitchy, experimental aesthetic to reframe the emotional core, to make it accessible to people who would normally be put off by the sentimentality. He wanted to present a very emotional story about an abused cat to an audience that speaks his language.

The production took four years. He ran a Kickstarter that raised about ten thousand euros, but nearly half went to fulfilling backer rewards, leaving only five thousand for the actual film. That's nothing for a multi-year animated project. But the campaign gave him something money couldn't buy: 110 people who believed in the work before it existed. When Ugly was finished, it played around 150 festivals worldwide. The ugly aesthetic had found its audience.

Backflip came from YouTube. Nikita was fascinated by videos of people attempting backflips in their bedrooms and backyards, mattresses stacked on the floor, total amateur ambition. He saw something in those clips: people being overly ambitious with somewhat stupid goals. The danger of trying something where you could break your neck if you execute it wrong.

He connected this to technology, to the way humans always want to create things they cannot fully control. Simulation, AI, systems that exceed our grasp. There's an element of danger in that too. Backflip became a meditation on both.

To make the film, Nikita trained a digital avatar of himself using a machine-learning technique called DeepMimic. The avatar learned to stand, walk, cartwheel, and eventually backflip, each action taking several days of training. He worked with a small team: Max Schneider built the training environment, Gerhard Funk helped with VR, David Kamp handled sound. The result was a character that moved with realistic physics but also with the chaos and unpredictability that defines Nikita's work.

He pushed even further with Downonly, an installation connected to blockchain that live-streamed an animation and minted each fall as an NFT. The project nearly collapsed. They finished fifteen minutes before launch. The computer crashed during the event (as planned). They minted thirty-something falls.

Nikita doesn't start projects with fully formed ideas. He learns about things over the process of making them. Even after a project is finished, he's still in the process of understanding it.

Chance plays a huge role. He got into cumbia music, and it happened that he was living in León, Mexico, a city famous for its Sonidero street parties where cumbia is central. That accident is shaping his next project, a piece about people coming together at outdoor gatherings. It's going to take a while, he says, as with everything.

He has more ideas than he can make. One unrealized concept: a karate movie in the style of old Jean-Claude Van Damme films, done in his ugly aesthetic, with a soundtrack by Paul Hertzog. Whether it happens or not, the ideas keep coming.

"I don't really have a desire for being understood in that sense," Nikita says. "I just don't want to do anything fake or inauthentic."

Artists inspiring @nikitadiakur lately: David O'Reilly, Gints Zilbalodis, David Shrigley, his collaborator Gerhard Funk (@gyfunk), Peter Millard, and Sarina Nihei.

Collectors and supporters: @aval0vara, @0xmichalis, @halecar2, and @leyla_solos.

His next project, Sonideros, is about street parties and community. The broken simulations continue, the chaos engine keeps running, and the puppets wait to surprise him with whatever they do next.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Nikita recommends @lm_netwebs, @Salawaki_3000, and @quasimondo.