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.

It’s hard for me to disentangle painting from music in the sense that I see them as different limbs of the same body. But mechanically, the videos are much closer to music for me than GIFS or still images. Editing on Premiere feels second nature to me, considering my experience with DAWS like Logic and Ableton.

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.

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.

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.

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”.