Evolution of Digital Art with Santiagoney (ttiimmees)

Santiagoney (Napster)

Santiagoney (Napster), from Uruguay, is an experimental artist who thrives at the intersection of digital and physical mediums. His art, focusing on non-figurative imagery, emphasizes practice over theory, creating a unique blend of tactile and digital experiences. Notably, his 3D sculpture "Shadow for Music," featured in ACCOMPART'S "Weightlessness.glb" auction and the Gallery, explores the theme of temporality. I'll be interviewing Santiagoney to delve into his creative process and insights on the digital art evolution, offering a peek into the future of art in the web3 era.

Interview for the ACCOMPART’S

Santiagoney, your work spans across abstract 2D art and immersive 3D sculptures like "Shadow for Music". How has your artistic approach evolved as you've navigated between these mediums?

A/ I have made drawings with ink for many years (2010-now), many hours a day. It was a very hard process to train my muscles, and unlearn ideas I had about what drawing meant, and find a way, a place, where I felt comfortable. Maybe it wasn’t a goal or an arrival place, it just happened and other things could have been the result of all that work. 

The result: I can just sit and make a drawing, 

And I like them, and I have thousands that look kind of the same 

Just a bunch of lines with more and less concentration everywhere to some, 

But a world to myself. 

In 2017 I bought a stylus for the first time, I had played with zbrush in a friend’s house some years before, but I didn’t have tools with me. I started trying to understand digital sculpture, slowly, and integrated that with my practice of blender, which also started close to 2010. I am very bad at blender, I have learned little in all these years, but I do use the two or three things I know how to do with it. 

In those years, 2017 or 2018 or maybe I miss the date, blender added a cleaner and intuitive sculpting mode, like a whole playground similar to zbrush, but better in some aspects because it was free and inside a bigger software with more capabilities. 

I did with 3d an analog process to what I lived with ink and paper, spent hours and hours doing and doing till there was a “natural” way for me to do that. 

Shadow for music and many other pieces I have are part of this sort of work.

I push that default sphere the sculpting softwares have, in ways that my hand now wants but that maybe I constructed with my eyes once. 

"Shadow for Music" delves into themes of temporality and the end of time. Can you share the conceptual genesis of this piece and how it reflects your broader artistic vision?

A/ I am always thinking about the end of the world. 

And the end of time. 

And our end too(?)

And my own end I guess, as every other human. 

But often I am just thinking of the formal end, the logical or geometrical or mathematical end. Gravity has shaped our perception of everything, being the ground for our physics, biology, etc. Same with time. We live those parameters and they shape our flesh and our consciousness. So, the end of time could be the event of a last bit of linear time happening, or the torn veil about time, the appearance or the vivid sensation, or the intuition of time beyond linear time. Music is our biggest ally in achieving this wider perspective, and, this is one example in many, of practical uses of art. 

You blend digital and physical elements in your art. How do you balance these aspects to maintain the essence of your work, especially in a digital-first space like web3?

A/ It’s true, this is a digital-first place. And in fact my “job” consists often in making digital images. When that happens I keep on painting for me here, and drawing, I use those later and integrate them to something, and if this does not happen, they become my secret drawings for my enjoyment so that’s good too.

Other periods of time I push more my physical drawings into crypto twitter and some NFT platforms, but now for a while I have been giving that work to my other name and account Arlen Maltby known by many as me and by others as “someone”. 

With collectors like Slayerofdemons and Superbright, how do you see the role of the collector in the digital art ecosystem?

A/ I just airdropped them my current tez edition. For reading their names here. 

I don’t know, they look great. 

You've chosen platforms like rc.xyz and Foundation for selling your NFTs. What considerations guide your choice of platforms, and how do they influence your engagement with the digital art community?

A/ I started on hen, 

This is the model I have as my first idea of how an NFT art platform is. 

Punk, about the art, experimental, very driven to inclusion of the global south. 

There’s nothing like it now. Maybe Zora in a pinch, but anyway very different. 

(I just copied this and tweeted it haha sorry :)

Your abstract 2D artworks, like "I used to feel love" and "portrait of yourself," sound very personal. Can you share what inspires you to create art that delves into such intimate aspects of your experience?

A/ I like corny songs 

I used to write poetry and it was very about breaking language, breaking grammar, finding parallel forms or new forms of verbal communication.Then this became like a science of sound weights or shapes I used to see in the syntactic structures and relations to the world somehow but in other aspects very lost in a place out of this world, not about life, not about feelings, more about noise, shadows of it.

So all the corny things and the second person singular, the love talk, is just a joke on top of that, like “what would be the last thing this person would say”. 

Anyway I used to write about love and feelings too, before, and then as a joke, and then I also think there’s no ironic relation to art, music, ideas, we just get closer and lose interest and interest comes again, so,I think it’s possibly my way of expressing that side of me, a general cloud of ideas about love and loss and intimate stuff. An oblique way to relate to it, as a joke sometimes, as something really felt other times. Who knows. 

Could you walk us through your creative process, from conceptualization to the final digital piece?

A/

I have been very bullish all week. 

I haven’t slept enough. 

I am in front of the computer, open almost every toolI use regularly, 

Start things in many of them, 

Sometimes I find something and there’s so much that I need to start taking it out and cleaning it sometimes but lose all enjoyment cause the vision is there and needs to be saved. And then I feel I need to cure myself from that fomo, and go try to cook something, or eat, or read, or watch a movie, and also I draw in little bits of time, with different materials.

Who or what are your major artistic inspirations, and how have they shaped your approach to creating art in the digital age?

A/ I think Bitbruts, Waffles, Kuujeb Sharo, Dinny P.D., have been a great inspiration to me in the last couple of years.They are all the same guy, some american guy that hides his identity and has been many NFT artist identities. He was closer to physical pieces and thoughts at the beginning so I kind of feel we lived a similar process, of becoming more and more a digital artist, maybe not, maybe he was all the way one, but I assume this from seeing the work and how it has changed in this period. 

Littlecakes, major inspiration both in art and life, and probably the wisest person I had the pleasure to meet, online, and I hope one day in person. 

And Clint Fulkerson and Yuri jjjj, huge inspiration all the time and we share a place, conceptual or in practices or something I couldn’t absolutely nail to define but both would agree if asked about this. 

Salawaki 3000, she’s a rockstar to my eyes and every most subtle hue/direction where to take the universe she builds all the time I am shocked of how good and how crazy and precise. It’s like magic to my eyes since I am more a visual artist than conceptual. I see the discourse grow and evolve and change shape and place and I am astonished every time. 

My kid, Amalia, all the time, she is amazing 💙

Every Brazilian artist from hicetnunc. 

And Naked Galina, an oil painter and friend, from web3 too, amazing, <3

Looking ahead, are there new technologies, themes, or mediums you're eager to explore in your art? 

A/

I want to make a movie. 

About just general bullshit, 

And also about how I live, logging in to twitter, driving to the gas station to have a coffee, drawing, etc. And about capitalism. And about nothing. 

Artist @ttiimmees

Interview @YNKAdigital

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