M: When I started music, I often asked myself how a painting would feel as a song. Texture and color were very important gauges for me, and I'd often look at visual art more so than other songs for inspiration. And the reverse happened when I started painting. What inspires anything I make is a desire to dig beyond the medium and capture a mood, attitude or feeling. And that process isn't really directional in that I'm not targeting a mood and building toward it, I'm discovering it through the making; in other words, the aesthetic and the frame emerge from the creation.

DROOL is a good example. The early efforts had a more aggressive quality, but as the pieces developed, that frame fell away, and what I was actually making revealed itself as being about pressure. That word arrived through the work, not before it. The medium to me is a language of sorts, and some languages afford different expressive registers, but the expression is still sourced from the same font.

M: I've found that digital painting simply doesn't afford me the tactile friction that I enjoy most about painting. I cherish very much the relationship between myself, my materials, and the context of creation. The materiality of the process is lacking, and so too is the joy in making marks. With AI generation, the attraction is different altogether. The expressive moment happens in the curation, the editing, the deleting, the removing. It's a different itch that gets scratched. When I do use digital painting tools, it's typically in service of some larger goal and not an end in itself, for example, to edit or augment something. In earlier work (before I started manta_timing), I used a lot of digital painting tools for making animations. So the mark-making wasn't the point, and I wouldn’t qualify what I did with digital painting tools as “painting”. At least not my idea of what painting is.

M: manta_timing is very much informed by internet culture, and internet culture is characterized by fast consumption. So I’d say the initial burst of my output was intent on leaning into that. Golden Boy is a good example, as it was made within that register. Puppy Love, too, I think, was a collection you could look at and like quickly.

However, as I’ve become more enmeshed in and inspired by what’s going on in the culture, I’ve made work that was designed with a slower, more considered viewing experience in mind. The video I made for HEAVEN, for example, is considerably more meditative and earnest and asks the viewer to meet it at its level. It’s almost strange to have released that anonymously, considering how personal it was.

So I’m operating in both registers, and it shifts case by case. I made a suite of 1/1 videos leading up to DROOL that I released for free on vvv that capture the breadth, I think.

M: The body has always been a central subject for me and really for much of Western art. Representational art is deeply rooted in a fascination with the body as the primary vessel through which we experience and express ourselves.

I think you’re right that the body feels like one of the last anchors to physical reality as we become increasingly digital. We still need to eat, sleep, fuck, and move through the world. That tension keeps the body charged as a subject, and that’s the core of DROOL.

M: Yes certainly. Art in general is a form of articulation, and articulation by its very nature calcifies and reduces. Anything that gets "transcribed" loses something, but it becomes something else in its own right. When I render a body, and that rendering takes shape as an image or a sculpture, it's no longer a body but a frame and a container of expression.

I'm not sure I "seek" to preserve physicality in any deliberate sense. It's more of a knack, an instinctive orientation toward the body as subject. I think of those cave painters in Spain, scribbling figures on a wall. I assume there was not much consideration made, and it was intuition that got them to render what they did. And across both digital art and my physical work, I operate with a similar bent. The body just shows up because that's what activates me.

M: If there were a word that thematically centered this series, it would be "pressure". So any renderings that landed as attractive vs. unattractive were incidental. Corporeality under pressure can swing towards harmony and chaos, and that's the core characteristic of this collection. There was no deliberate balance in the selection. I made around 200 GLBs and curated them down to 20; the only criterion was whether each piece was good enough to stand on its own.

M:Yes, this is something I think about more in the releasing than in the making. I just make stuff, and some of it is good, and some of it is bad, but I'm a bit more calculated when it comes to curation and exhibition. With DROOL specifically, the GLB format kept it front of mind as it's not a format that is very ubiquitous. The series and its frame didn't precede the format. I was playing with GLBs, and the collection emerged from that. As for the release, vvv.so has recently added GLB support, and they did a great job at it (though as far as I know, no one except Vajunnie has released a GLB collection there yet). I also had to decide whether to keep the blind mint or allow collectors to browse and choose as vvv.so now supports both, but I kept it blind. The collection was made with that in mind, and it would feel wrong to change course now.

M: It was fairly organic. Matto commented on one of my posts last summer and encouraged me to mint on vvv.so. When I checked it out, I was immediately excited and energized by what was happening there; the work I'd see felt very fresh and potent and shambolic in the best ways. I was inspired to make something that fit the platform's energy.

And so a month later, I released Golden Boy, and about a month after that, I released HEAVEN. The community was very welcoming and supportive, and it felt natural to end up in that part of the digital art world.

Coming into that culture, I was responding more to the energy and freedom than to its specific visual language. But with HEAVEN, I was more conscious about the aesthetic touchstones of the culture of vvv.so, which for me wasn’t so much about collaging or traitmaxxing as it was many images iterating off a fixed compositional framework. Looking back, I see that that isn’t necessarily native exclusively to vvv.so but for me it was. So HEAVEN took my localized conception and applied that logic: fixed composition, green field, blue sky, horizon centered, with figures and shapes percolating about.

M: I’d say the latter. But I’d say it didn’t necessarily “reveal” anything so much as it encouraged me to just go for it. I distinctly remember seeing Vorebug and thinking, “ok, anything goes in this part of town”.

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