Based in Los Angeles, Nusi Quero’s work flirts between the perimeters of the virtual and the visceral. His digital designs depicting a profusion of incandescent, celestial elegance, have since transmogrified into a series of futuristic 3D-rendered couture pieces. Recently being appointed as the “alien computer brain” behind Grimes’s new back tattoo, our conversation drew on themes relating to the posthuman body and its increasingly habitual amalgamation with technology.

Can you introduce yourself? Tell us about your roots. From a background in music, how and why did you start making visual art?

My Name is Nusi Quero. When I was born, my mother named me Paul. When I asked her why, she didn’t really have a good answer for it- and she is always a woman who has a good answer. So I decided to change it to something more suitably peculiar and nice on the tongue for what I think of as myself. I’m from the USA, mostly raised in Florida. The first type of art-like activity I ever truly passionately participated in was graffiti. I went into it wanting to be bad kind of, and came out of it really giving a fuck what my spraycan or marker was doing, and it instilled me with a profound fascination with I guess in the broadest sense would call aesthetic and harmonic systems. This has applied to all of the fields of inquiry and making I have been a part of : art, ‘fashion’, architecture, and music.

Why is a question I very seldom ask, I think it is a recursive one that always leads back to who or what god is. I think we are god, or becoming a version of god, so we all as one amorphous and contradictory consciousness are why I started making art. Lame answer maybe, I'm not really sure why I started, I think it was intuitive and environmental. Now I make art to stay away from existential apocalypse, and to make myself and others feel something unknowable hopefully, it really is the reason I live for this feeling. I make art because the mirror of reality has reflected back to me the sentiment that I should continue doing so.

How would you describe your work?

I would describe it as intuitive, emergent, but intentional. I don't think a lot about what's happening in the world while I'm making things. I don't write much, and I don't really read, at all, especially books. My memories and knowledge I let speak through my hands, kind of subliminally maybe, and there is an intuitive momentum that has built around the work that has provided enough criteria and pathways of expression and research that keeps me intrigued and devoted to it, my work just follows that. It's mostly based on a faith that beauty will emerge if I try as hard as I can to discover or decode it. It's not my beauty I am sharing with people, nor beauty that I invented, It was always there, waiting to be found, dusted off, and put on a podium for people to behold. I like thinking of it like this, I think it's true. I will say that I have devoted my life now to bringing this beauty, or the feeling of awe to people. It is sublime when it happens.

You refer to yourself as ‘The Rascal’… Could you elaborate on this?

I like the idea of a rascal. A troublemaker, but one without malice, just in it for the jest, in it to remind people that everything doesn't have to be so fucking serious. Alan Watts talks a lot about rascalian tendencies, I like the way he thinks of reality, acknowledging the absurdity of it and lack of consent we all had in participating with it, even though he too is a white male who grew up in moderate privilege with a fraction of the friction that the rest of humanity must endure from the aimless cruelty of our mutating and asymmetric culture.

I like to fuck around, I think all of my best work has come from me playing, without expectation, without the frightened stare into the mirror of our social and cultural environment, it's really horrifying how pretty much all people have no idea what the fuck they are doing, and why or how to do it. I've found a nice little nook to perch in and throw little pebbles I've tumbled in my rivers at the lemmings who wander around buying horseshit and becoming the people they once hated. I'll probably become that too, but maybe if I play long and hard enough my life will pass by and I won't get the chance. That's the plan I think.

Where do you find your inspiration? Do you have any current muses? Who, or what, inspires your practice?

The inspiration at this point is partly pretty self referential, not in like an egocentric way but like wanting to continue or expand on the last thing I did because I got such a kick out of doing it and I know it can be better or further inquired about. The other part is definitely how people receive it. I fucking love when people hammer out a bunch of squirt emojis or call my work disgusting or problematic. It's like 'great, I have their attention now, so don't stop dancing you idiot.' It's very inspiring, however shallow or obvious that seems. My muse is not a real person, but I definitely have one for the couture type work I do, I think of her as like this omniscient hyper beautiful shamanic sexy but asexual elegant scary but benevolent ultra empress character that has like big cats and untame-able predators following behind her everywhere obediently. I try to make my things worthy of her, and eventually I want to try to create or represent her for everyone to behold or experience in some capacity, I really can't wait to do that.

Do you consider your work to be ‘wearable art’ or ‘fashion’? Is it important to distinguish between the two as separate binaries?

I think I consider that side of my work to be 'wearable art'. Fashion is a concept based on the feedback loop of popular culture, what's in, what's hot, what the cool kid of the day VirgIl Ablohblahblahs are doing. Seeing how I literally don't pay attention to any of that shit in the slightest capacity while doing it, and I would really like to prevent my work (that is very dear to me) as being ' ugh like so last winter'. I will adamantly deny that it is fashion, and that I am a part of the fashion industry. But it can indeed be worn,and I hope it will be worn, and feel different to wear than what we think of as fashion.

How does your creative process unfold? Give us an insight into the method through which you make your work. Do you have any routines that give shape to your creative practice? When you start designing a piece, do you have an idea in mind or a feeling you want to invoke?

This matter is what I think is sacred to me, and what I'd prefer not to share in depth for now, besides what I put in my other responses here. I will say that the discovery of this process as an internal journey has led directly to the confidence that I should keep doing it. I guess it feels personal. I don't care nearly as much about the art I make as I do the fact that I have developed my own rituals and protocols and processes for myself, without guidance or reference. Me avoiding this question is simply me recommending this arduous and sometimes lonely journey to other makers of mostly somewhat useless things like couture and renderings, because it feels so fucking good when it starts working, without the fear of being bitten from or hijacked, for now.

Do you digitally design with the physical in mind? Does one precede the other? What relationship do the two have within your work and why is it important to translate your virtual designs into tangible fruition?

I find myself constantly fascinated by the two realms of virtual and visceral. The viscerality of reality is where we truly experience things on a sensory and spatial level, the boundaries of it are Resolute and unforgiving. I think I have become no longer interested in the poetics of mediating with the laws that govern our physical realities. The veil has been lifted for me I suppose in the sense of what’s to come, not in that we can transcend or ignore them, but in that we can think and imagine and illustrate visions that are both rational and fantastical, knowing they will one day not too far off be completely possible to experience or behold.

I think the realization of my digitally designed works is important because it reminds me and everyone else that anything is possible I think, and because I still am a sucker for tactile crafts, experiences I can design that do more than just stimulate the ears and eyes. I also now have experienced the profound feeling of making something for someone to wear that empowers them, unleashes them, pushes their boundaries of identity or style or sexuality. It’s truly an amazing thing to witness and I’m honored to do it for people who try on or commission my couture-like work.

A lot of your digital works can be characterised by their glossy, mellifluent surfaces. How do you decide which materials to print your 3D models, in order to preserve such celestial properties into the physical?

My 3D printed wearable work is not much of a decision, I’m literally only using what I have because they are the resources I have on hand that I can afford or manage right now. It’s for the most part made of a slightly flexible resin that I try to makedo with but to be honest I’ve been giddy to expand beyond it since even before I started printing my work. There are lots of tools (CNC, vacuum forming, laser cutting) that I would be utilizing already and absolutely will as soon as I can. But for now I’m bound to my little set up.

The glossiness and finish characteristics in the physical and digital work are mostly a product of my fascination with refraction and iridescence. It’s just so fucking pretty when things are multicolored and react to light, like on a dumb primal shiny sparkly moth to a flame level I’m just smitten by and devoted to it eternally.

What are the messages you'd like to get across in your art? And how do you think 3D design can help us better understand the increasingly intimate and parasitic relationship between technology and the body?

I perhaps bear a risk of losing interest or some sort of intellectual respect when I say this but there is no message, the art is absolutely the message, it is the canon. It holds symbols and ideas and information that has been refracted through my memories, for me to speak about it would undermine its potentiality, and be a naive interpretation of my complex and chaotic mind and lens. I work mostly on intuition, on hunches. Usually the further I end up from an idea I set out to achieve the more people respond to the work, and find meaning in it, and I love that. There is certainly intention, and meaning in it. It is all emergent though- so I listen to it, rather than speak to it.

However expressively valid most art is, I am tired of and not interested in art and expression that needs an explanation or referential praxis to be deemed valuable, or even exist. Like the contemporary art trope of a wooden chair in the center of a 3000 sq foot gallery and a postcard sized plaque on the wall with 800 words about its dialectic with deconstructivism or whatever the fuck. I want to make things that if someone dug up 50,000 years from now, with no context, ‘they’ would find it beautiful, peculiar, or awful- but not forgettable or commonplace, at least amongst the other artifacts around it. No one's going to give a shit about that fucking chair, at least I certainly wouldn't.

I don’t think the relationship of technology with the body is parasitic. We are consenting for the most part- it’s more of a symbiosis. I’m often presented with thoughts about and requests to make a sort of cyborg type scenario, which I don’t find very exciting, I think this idea of the Terminator t-101 chrome pneumatic bolt ridden anatomy peeking through flesh is hilariously unrealistic and sad.. to think that by implanting this crude gadgetry into the most elegantly advanced machine we are aware of (the human body) that we are somehow upgrading our potentialities of interfacing with reality, when in reality it’s just a tiny neurological implant that will be the most profound change to the way we think and communicate and live. I don’t think it’s parasitic because I have a hard time deciding where nature begins and ends. I can’t really understand what isn’t nature, though the virtual world still seems separate. I think it is probably universally agreed that it is an imagined landscape still, as our senses can’t all acknowledge its immersiveness in simultaneity.

Post-humanism and digital creations often challenges normative views of bodily aspiration. Is this any consequence to you? What role does beauty and proportion play in your work?

No, it’s not of consequence to me. I think people should look how they want to look, and represent themselves however they’d like to. Unfortunately there is so much external pressure to look a ‘certain way’ (beauty standards, idol worship, advertising and media, perhaps even my work but it’s not my intention) that people are unable to or are rightfully afraid to recognize their own vision for themselves, in fear of rejection or shame. Forming our physical identities is like a form of architecture- our bodies are a site and there must be an appropriate intervention designed there that responds to our environment, not something that exists because the designer turned on TmZ and got pressured to conform to a building or intervention that occurred across the world, from a completely different context than it is in. Maybe it’s a stretch as a metaphor, the whole world of beauty is really fucked up.

I think beauty is about how intentions are executed, but also about unwavering and mathematically rationalized aesthetic harmonies. Bodies sometimes don’t fall within those formulas of harmonizing proportions, and that is fine, but we must acknowledge and celebrate that the moment is on the horizon when these unchosen vehicles for our consciousnesses can be sculpted or re-imagined or refined or completely abandoned in lieu of a virtual identity. I just wish we didn’t make each other feel so bad about our bodies until we get there. They are such a microscopic aspect of the beautiful complexity of a human mind, and soul. It’s a vehicle, not the treasure inside of it, or on the outside of it.

Despite its fluidity, the post-human body has often been characterised as ‘feminine’ in its depictions, take for example Donna Harraway’s seminal work ‘The Female Cyborg’. Your work tends to interact with primarily female bodies — Is there a reason for this? Identifying as male, do you find the male gaze informs aspects of your work when designing for the female body?

Right now I am primarily interacting with female bodies for three reasons I think. Male bodies I find objectively less aesthetically harmonic, I find them angular, and unlike the curves my mind lends itself to. Perhaps there is a slight chicken and egg conundrum there but I'm just responding to intuition. The second reason is that I am choosing to limit the amount of criteria that can inform the work. I feel as though far too many people try to address too many things without actually doing any of them in a powerful way. By introducing masculine geometries and themes into my work I introduce a whole new universe and can of worms for exploration and discourse. I'll get there eventually, but I'm happy with this constraint for the time being. The third reason, however simplistic, is that primarily women respond passionately and optimistically to the work itself. Men don't really seem to give much of a shit about what I'm doing since the get go, even before I was making couture. I'm just responding to that and following the portals of momentum that open up to me.

I absolutely love making things that empower women, or make them discuss, or covet, or imagine themselves in the work. I feel like I owe it almost. In regards to the second half of your question, yes the male gaze informs my work. I'm a male with eyes, but I think it mostly informs it on a level of how it's informed what women want to wear, as a form of power, almost hypnotism. Its an amazing issue to think about in our current times, perhaps there will be an opportunity to discuss it more at length in the future.

Can you tell us about the work you created for Grimes? How did this collaboration emerge? Did you have any particular references in mind when you made the work? What was her initial vision? Did the outcome evolve throughout the design process?

I’m doing a lot of work with Grimes at the moment, she has become a good friend and ally. We are both very interested in the future, in beauty, and in language. I think that the tattoo design that I collaborated on with Tweakt that you are likely referencing is a perfect product of these interests. There were no references, it was very spontaneous. I literally grew my design off of the sort of aesthetic armature that Tweakt drew, using procedural rule sets that I had set up beforehand for use with other aspects of her project. The outcome evolved through the process, it emerged. I’m very happy with it! She is too, I think.

How do you think your work would have been received 100 years ago? And 100 years from now? What is the future for digital art?

100 years ago, the couture I think could have gone off- The roaring 20’s were all about opulence, being a peacock... my pieces definitely embrace that energy. The animation and 3D work might have been spat on or ignored. The taboo of sexuality and the grotesque is much more widely embraced today, I am grateful for this and look forward to a reality where nothing is off limits, where we can just experience and feel things without people taking it personally. Perhaps this will never happen though. I’m trying to push it forward.

In 100 years from now I think it will be enjoyed hopefully the same way it is now. I don’t reference any elements of our zeitgeist in my work specifically and think for the most part could be interpreted in a similar way as minds interpret it now. At least, I truly hope so! I have a hard time ideating the future, and try to avoid it, seeing as most depictions of it (not all) from the past are pretty short sighted or cringey.