Hello, nice to meet you.
My name is Mikhail, but you can call me Misha. I am a multidisciplinary designer and artist
exploring how stories take form within spaces, screens, and ourselves.
In brief, my practice is one of giving shape and meaning to ideas. I build design systems, visual identities, and intentional experiences, while also using clothing and costume as tools to distort and affirm the body as a site of narrative.
I am drawn to the tension between the familiar and the unknown, to concepts that evoke both history and possibility. Through digital formats and material mediums, my work translates objects, images, and structures into purposeful designs.
No algorithm can replicate the enduring emotions in artifacts and ephemera, in the clouded landscapes of the North Atlantic, in the worn edges of belongings that have passed through many hands.
Lately, I’ve been grappling with thoughts of abandoned media and unread books, of lost skills and songs no longer sung. Consumption habits reduce empathy to transaction while deep learning promises to free us from the so-called burden of thought. Patterns of data stretched over the shambling bones of borrowed nostalgia cannot sustain us indefinitely. What remains, if not what we dare to experience for ourselves? What we choose to share with one another?
My goal is to create work that lingers quietly, reveals what we cannot see, and invites us to imagine new ways of belonging.
Currently based in Salem, MA.
Available for collaborations, commissions, photoshoots, tabletop rpgs, tarot readings...
Alternative forms: misericord, miséricorde
Pronunciation: [mɪzəˈrɪkɔrd]
Derived from Latin misericordia (“act of mercy”), itself from miser (“miserable”) and cor (“heart”). The term entered Middle English between 1200 and 1250 as misericorde, borrowed from Old French.
A misericorde was a long, narrow knife used during the High Middle Ages to deliver mercy killings to mortally wounded knights. Its slender blade was designed to penetrate the gaps in plate armor.
Etymology and history: In the first half of the 12th century, misericorde denoted “kindness by which God forgives humans.” By 1664, it appeared as the exclamation miséricorde! expressing misfortune, and in 1680, within the phrase à tout péché miséricorde (“to every sin, mercy”). Around 1268, it referred to “a virtue that leads one to relieve the suffering of others.” The expression crier miséricorde (“to cry for mercy” or “to shout loudly”) is attested from 1640. Circa 1180, misericorde designated a “very short sword.” By approximately 1250, it described a “small wooden bracket fixed beneath the seat of a choir stall,” comparable to medieval Latin misericordia, attested from the 11th century. In 1680, the term denoted a meal a Carthusian monk took once weekly consisting of bread and oil, and in 1721, a period of recreation or relaxation occasionally granted to monks. The maritime term ancre de miséricorde (“anchor of mercy”) is recorded from 1832.
Absolute literary frequency is 932, with relative frequency in the 19th century at 1764 and 1476 for primary senses, and in the 20th century at 1349 and 855.
“The mediator of the head and the hands must be the heart.”
— Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927)
The structure gleams. The depths grind. The furnace burns. Everything works. Nothing speaks.
Distance is not measured in height, but in memory.
The head remains above. It calculates, optimizes, divides. It draws no nourishment.
The hands perform below. They move in cycles, again and again, until they forget what the motion was ever for.
The heart is not the obvious solution. It is not efficient. It is not clean. It does not always make sense. But it is the only part that remembers both the command and the consequence. It is the only part that carries messages both upward and down.
It does not restore harmony. That would be too easy. It allows for dissonance. It endures contradiction without requiring it be solved. It takes the sterile brilliance of thought and the exhausted grit of labor, and keeps them from turning to dust in opposite corners of the same house.
It holds the shape of something that could still be human.
A wet, imperfect, sacred machine.
When the heart is absent, the ritual persists. But the temple is hollow. The altar speaks no names. The serpent swallows its tail.
A system without the heart becomes a liturgy without a god.
Still spoken. Still moving. But only in echo.