Ask Pale Kirill if he always wanted to be an artist and he doesn't have to search his memory. He can check the tape. Somewhere in the family archive there's a video from early school, a kid asked what he wants to be, answering without hesitation: artist, because he loves to paint and draw.

Artist was only one of three answers he carried around. There was film director, because he was always filming something for fun. And there was Orthodox priest. He grew up in a religious family, went to church every Sunday (still does), and as a child the black robes and the beards were simply charming. Wanting it felt organic. There was no other reason. "Just because this is the part of my life," he says, and laughs. "But yeah, I'm not a priest."

He tells it lightly. The priest thing never fully left.

Kirill is Belarusian, but he was born in Siberia, where his parents had been sent for work building roads. When he was about five the family returned to Belarus, and his childhood and school years all belong to Minsk. What he kept from Siberia is one image. "I still clearly remember the winter and all those massive snow."

In school he played basketball, mostly street ball. For several years he wore a back brace to straighten his spine, which settled the question of going pro before it could be asked. What remained was playing outside, and what remains of that is a symbol. "For me, basketball, it's a hope to some brighter future," he says. It keeps showing up in the work. The spine, he's happy to report, is fine now.

At eighteen he moved to Moscow for university, and he's been there since 2009. The degree was a family negotiation. His dad works in real estate design and construction, so architecture read as both creative and a continuation of the family path. He got the master's, practiced briefly, and left. Architecture is slow, he says, and often the technology can't keep up with the ideas. Graphic design pulled him instead, with its fast iterations and small experiments, and it's been his main income for more than ten years now. What he kept from architecture is the method: research the question, develop the concept, then the details.

Before the visual work settled, he tried everything that made a mark. A camera arrived and he was shooting short films and homemade advertising with his friends and sisters. At university he wrote poems for about two years, bought a microphone, and recorded what he calls abstract hip hop tracks. Then came painting classes with the Russian artist Andrey Tukanov, built on Vkhutemas and Bauhaus, and those opened his eyes to "the things that always stayed behind the work." His first paintings were abstract.

The last one dates to 2021, the year he met AI. He typed some words and the computer made the whole image by itself. "It was really strange and weird," he says. "It was something that I didn't understand." He walked away, came back in 2022, and never left again. Now he uses it daily, for almost everything, and he's genuinely unbothered by the debates. "We live in a great time for creators. The only limit is you."

Last year he made a manifesto and called it The Old Man, after the biblical old self. It's built on two questions: why do I create, and how can I learn to love. Eight videos, poems he wrote himself, visuals and AI audio assembled as what he calls "a kind of pray," presented by Fellowship. There are no answers in it, on purpose. The questions are engines, he says. They push you to create and to keep asking why.

The clearest statement of his philosophy is borrowed from Tarkovsky. When you create, you pray: to your creator, and to the people who watch what you make. That's why the work has to be honest. For Kirill, that's answer enough.

The faith underneath isn't decorative. His reading runs to Paisios of Mount Athos ("easy to read and full of love and meaning"), Father Alexander Men, Anthony of Sourozh. And it produces positions you don't hear every day in AI art discourse, like his refusal to pick a style. Everyone, he noticed, is hunting for a single signature look. His answer is named after the giant. "Why should I find a single style if I can mix all of the styles, if I can defeat this Goliath, like David?" Goliath style mixes 3D, VHS, oil painting, whatever he loves, trained into models until something unique falls out.

If he could keep only one project, he'd keep ULTRALOVE. It's a short film and a series of video works built from VHS tapes of his own childhood, mixed, extended, and rebuilt with AI. He was early to Pika's video extension, pushing his family footage onto a bigger canvas and prompting the edges outward. Then he went further. "I added some angels there," he says, "and it looks pretty strange and I love it."

The companion piece is Not Me, made for the Reflections show at Tender, now Heft Gallery. He fed his childhood photos into image-to-image and asked the machine to imagine the lives he didn't live: the artist, the priest, the basketball player, the angel. The final works were physical paintings, executed by Matr Labs' painting robot. The three answers from the school video, run through the machine and hung on a wall.

His focus right now is Genius Loci, unreleased, nearly a year in the making. The name is Latin for the spirit of the place, the mystical side of architecture that hooked him as a student. The work is an interactive point-and-click, built with Cursor as the engine and Midjourney for the visuals, and he insists it isn't a game. No bosses, no complex plots. You click, you move through the places. Every location comes from his mind, recreated from memories of childhood with his current feelings laid over them, "a strange mix of something from the past that I try to reimagine right now."

It connects to the theme he calls the main one: the ever-changing home. Home as a meta home, something under the skin that everyone shares and nobody shares, an emotional super-system floating above all real houses. The interactive turn has a simple motive. Images stopped being enough, then videos stopped being enough. "It's to be close to the viewer," he says, like being in one room together, only the room is digital.

Go for a walk. "Simple but so hard," he admits. He claims no special creative habits beyond it.

Lilyillo. One of his favorite artists in the space. He says she hasn't posted in months, so his recommendation is to go to her page and share some love. "She always goes deep into the themes and she explores."

Magic: The Gathering. Play with him. It's his favorite game, and he builds his own decks and hunts for card synergies instead of copying lists from the internet, which he points out is the same instinct as combining AI tools. "If you don't know rules, please welcome," he says. "I can explain."