Nikita Diakur is an animator and filmmaker born in Russia and based in Leipzig, Germany, whose work embraces glitches, chance, and physical simulation over polished computer-generated imagery.,Using dynamic simulation software such as Cinema 4D, he builds digital puppets whose interconnected body parts hang on simulated strings, letting the software's own calculations introduce unpredictable, often disfigured results.
Diakur's Ugly, begun in 2014, recreates found stories from the internet inside deliberately awkward, badly designed digital worlds.,The film UGLY reworks an online story about an abused cat deemed ugly, staged in an intentionally disfigured world.Fest pays tribute to YouTube fail-compilation culture, following characters through extreme situations and unexpected outcomes.,In Backflip, a digital avatar of Diakur himself repeatedly attempts and fails a backflip, using the exercise to reflect on machine learning and artificial intelligence. The work draws on British animators including Chris Shepherd and Jonathan Hodgson, as well as Johannes Nyholm and David O'Reilly, alongside the kitsch and self-help ephemera of internet culture.These films have screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, Annecy, and ISFF Oberhausen, and Diakur is a member of the European Film Academy and has held a residency at Q21 in Vienna.,
In 2021, Sharing BBQ, part of the Ugly series, marked Diakur's entry into crypto art.In early February 2023, he presented Drone on off as part of “Visual Detachment II”, a Nifty Gateway-curated Fakewhale Cross Drop alongside artists Jesse Draxler, Lucas Aguirre, and diewiththemostlikes.,The 2024 online exhibition Tilt, presented by Fellowship, gathered works from across his practice. In the artist's words, “the technique is a combination of puppeteering and dynamic computer simulation and varies between physically accurate and broken”.
In /backflip (2026), Diakur trained a machine-learning-driven digital copy of himself to attempt the trick his own body could not safely try, using the project to explore ambition, fear, and the pace of AI's advances.Drone Split, shown in the exhibition “(Land)scape” at Galerie Met in Berlin in November 2025, follows two synchronized viewpoints, a drone and a character carrying a camera, toward an inevitable collision inside a simulated, physics-driven space.Backflip was also included in “Alternate Realities”, the debut season of ArtReview and Nowness's channel MC2, in 2025.In March 2026, Diakur presented a new series, Autobahn, at SOLO CSV in Madrid during Madrid Art Week.,
