Ordinary Streets Seen Differently
Karyna Budaieva didn't set out to build an audience. She set out to post a photo of a door. Walking through Prague in 2024, she stopped to photograph one, planning to share it and move on the way anyone does. Back home, a different question took over: why not animate it. She opened After Effects with no real plan beyond curiosity, and what came out the other side became Urban Portals, the series she now creates under the name ERRXD.
The idea is deceptively simple. Ordinary elements of a city, a door, a wall, a stretch of pavement most people walk past without noticing, get pulled into motion, transformed into something hypnotic and rhythmic without ever losing their connection to the real place they came from. Karyna is drawn to that tension specifically, the surreal sitting right on top of the familiar rather than replacing it. It's the same instinct that shaped how she first learned to see cities at all, an early influence from creators like Nini Kachakhidze and Nadine Ghannoum taught her to notice architecture and street detail the way most people only notice a landmark. Her references have widened considerably since then, photography, music videos, cinema, other digital artists, but the habit of looking closely never left.
What surprised her wasn't that people responded. It was how far the response travelled. A specific, almost private idea, bringing the overlooked parts of a city to life, ended up resonating with people in countries she'd never worked in, opening doors to collaborations with artists, musicians, and brands.
The work has become inseparable from how she experiences travel itself. She's currently moving between cities, recently in Barcelona, now in Marseille, and the first thing she wants to do in any new place isn't sightsee in the traditional sense, it's walk the streets and start collecting material. Every city hands her something different, its own architecture, its own colour, its own texture, and Urban Portals keeps shifting shape along with wherever she happens to be standing.
She's direct about one thing people frequently get wrong. Her core Urban Portals animations aren't generative AI, they're built from real photographs she edits in Photoshop and animates by hand in After Effects. AI does appear in specific projects she's taken on with AI platforms, and she's noticed the assumption that follows, that using the tool somewhere automatically cheapens everything else she makes. She doesn't see it that way. To her, AI is one tool among many that can support the process without ever replacing the artist, the idea, or the visual language behind it.
What keeps the whole thing moving, more than any single success, is a habit she credits with shaping her more than talent ever did: simply continuing. Not every attempt works. Sometimes a piece comes out nothing like what she'd pictured. She's learned that isn't a reason to stop, just a reason to try again a week later, a month later, however long it takes for something that once felt difficult to become second nature. From here, she simply wants to keep developing her work, continue creating, and see how it evolves over time.
The idea is deceptively simple. Ordinary elements of a city, a door, a wall, a stretch of pavement most people walk past without noticing, get pulled into motion, transformed into something hypnotic and rhythmic without ever losing their connection to the real place they came from. Karyna is drawn to that tension specifically, the surreal sitting right on top of the familiar rather than replacing it. It's the same instinct that shaped how she first learned to see cities at all, an early influence from creators like Nini Kachakhidze and Nadine Ghannoum taught her to notice architecture and street detail the way most people only notice a landmark. Her references have widened considerably since then, photography, music videos, cinema, other digital artists, but the habit of looking closely never left.
What surprised her wasn't that people responded. It was how far the response travelled. A specific, almost private idea, bringing the overlooked parts of a city to life, ended up resonating with people in countries she'd never worked in, opening doors to collaborations with artists, musicians, and brands.
The work has become inseparable from how she experiences travel itself. She's currently moving between cities, recently in Barcelona, now in Marseille, and the first thing she wants to do in any new place isn't sightsee in the traditional sense, it's walk the streets and start collecting material. Every city hands her something different, its own architecture, its own colour, its own texture, and Urban Portals keeps shifting shape along with wherever she happens to be standing.
She's direct about one thing people frequently get wrong. Her core Urban Portals animations aren't generative AI, they're built from real photographs she edits in Photoshop and animates by hand in After Effects. AI does appear in specific projects she's taken on with AI platforms, and she's noticed the assumption that follows, that using the tool somewhere automatically cheapens everything else she makes. She doesn't see it that way. To her, AI is one tool among many that can support the process without ever replacing the artist, the idea, or the visual language behind it.
What keeps the whole thing moving, more than any single success, is a habit she credits with shaping her more than talent ever did: simply continuing. Not every attempt works. Sometimes a piece comes out nothing like what she'd pictured. She's learned that isn't a reason to stop, just a reason to try again a week later, a month later, however long it takes for something that once felt difficult to become second nature. From here, she simply wants to keep developing her work, continue creating, and see how it evolves over time.
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