A brick tower stands in a field of birch trees under a flat grey sky, and clinging to it are a dozen robed figures with the skulls of goats. Nothing moves except the fog. The color is wrong in the specific way that expired film stock goes wrong, greens gone sickly, blacks gone brown, everything one generation too many away from the negative.
That's the opening of a piece called "Sirens," and it lasts about eighteen seconds.
It was made by Lukas Nowacki, who posts as surreailist on Instagram. His account is over two hundred of these things, each one a short vertical loop with a two-word title and no explanation attached. Bat Country. Fire Sermon. Khaos Ark. House Always Wins. The Raven of Odin. Moomintrolls.
You scroll past a wall of them and it reads like the shot list for a film nobody finished.
surreailist — "Sirens," on Instagram
The Berlin Music Video Awards put him on their 2026 jury and described his work as breaking traditional narrative in favor of what he calls "psychological descents": short, hypnotic loops that feel like unsettling horror fairy tales. Their 2026 jury announcement adds that he draws on surrealism and transgressive cinema to build worlds where care morphs into a threat and beauty becomes overwhelming.
That last part is the thing you notice once you've watched a few. The threat is usually wearing something soft.
The loops are the trailer, not the film
Nowacki has been fairly direct about how he wants the reels understood. On his free Patreon page he writes that "the brief visual sequences you see on my instagram are just the tip of the iceberg. They are fleeting projections onto a wall, glimpses through a keyhole of a much larger, often darker cinematic universe."
He set the Patreon up as a place to explain the what, the why and the how, and he calls it "an invitation to step inside my subconscious and dissect how a lifetime of obscure influences is formalized into polished visual art." The membership is free. There's a $5 tier on top of it, but the door is open without paying.
So the eighteen-second horror clip is a keyhole. The room behind it is where he actually lives.
surreailist — "Khaos Ark," on Instagram
"Khaos Ark" is a good example of the lifetime-of-obscure-influences claim doing real work. A red ship rides a sea made of human hands. There's a woman with a clock built into her headdress. There are pigs in gilded cages and a chandelier the size of a cathedral. If you've spent any time with Bosch, or with Jan Švankmajer, or with the Quay Brothers, the vocabulary is familiar even though the images are new.
What he actually names
The tool he credits by name is the Kinovi generation platform. He lists it in his Instagram bio, and a piece he posted this week carries the caption "Created with @kinovi.ai."
Worth knowing what that credit actually points at, because Kinovi doesn't build models. It's a studio and a REST API sitting on top of other companies' models, with one credit balance covering both. Its published model catalog lists ByteDance's Seedance 2.0, Seedance 2.0 Fast, Seedance 2.0 Mini, and HappyHorse; Kuaishou's Kling 3.0; ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Pro and OpenAI's GPT Image 2 for stills; Midjourney V8 and Niji V7; Google's Nano Banana Pro; and four Suno endpoints for audio.
Pricing is per second of footage rather than per clip. Seedance 2.0 runs $0.0707 a second at 480p and $0.4239 a second at 1080p, which puts an eighteen-second piece like "Sirens" somewhere between a dollar and eight dollars of generation depending on the tier — before counting the takes that didn't make it.
So a "Created with @kinovi.ai" caption most likely means Seedance underneath, which is the same ByteDance model four other creators we've profiled are running through four different apps. The interesting part is that the same model produces wildly different work depending on who's driving it — none of those four look anything like a Polish folk-horror fever dream.
The platform's pitch is reference-driven rather than prompt-driven: you feed it images, clips, and audio to steer a shot instead of describing what you want and hoping. Video models expose a duration in seconds, a canvas resolution, and reference media as URLs.
That's a plausible fit for how his pieces hold together. Each film keeps one palette and one world across a dozen cuts — "Sirens" stays in the same grey Polish village from the tower to the goats to the girls in white — while the next piece jumps somewhere else entirely. Holding a look that tightly inside a single film, then dropping it completely for the next one, is the shape you'd expect from reference frames rather than a text prompt repeated.
Beyond that, he doesn't publish his stack in the feed. The captions are almost always just the title. One recent post is captioned "Jehovah is strength. Lucifer is light. Satan is separation. Christ is unification," and another is a line of alchemical text about a green and golden lion in whom the secrets of the philosophers are hidden.
Neither of those tells you what model he ran. The breakdowns go on Patreon instead, which is a deliberate split. The feed is the film, the Patreon is the commentary track, and his most recent post there is titled "Viral Transmutation: The Alchemy Behind the Reel."
surreailist — "Frequency Vortex," on Instagram
"Frequency Vortex" is the one I'd point at if somebody asked what he does. A small child kneels on a wet concrete floor in a peeling blue room, facing an old CRT television. A doorway behind them glows pink. A figure in a long coat with a gramophone horn where its head should be walks into that doorway and stops. Later there's a creature that's mostly a human ear, playing a trumpet against a flat teal void.
Nobody explains any of it. That's the register.
The commercial side is a separate door
His site at the surreailist.art contact page runs about four lines long. It says he's "crafting surreal music videos, bespoke digital art, and immersive visual campaigns and storytelling," and describes the work as "bridging the gap between the organic and the artificial." There's an email address on it and not much else.
That squares with the jury seat. The Berlin Music Video Awards brought him in specifically to help judge how generative tools are showing up in music videos, which is a working-director job rather than a poster-artist one.
surreailist — "Moomintrolls," on Instagram
If this territory interests you, we've covered neighbors. Gloomstomper's dark fantasy work sits in a similar register with a different palette, and GEDDYRUXPIN's AI short films run the same one-artist-one-feed model at a longer length.
Nowacki describes his own account as a "subversive AI kamp" and says he's deconstructing the artificial mind. He's been shipping a new descent every few days.