As you may have heard, GQ is dropping the GQ3 Issue 001: Change Is Good collection, a group of 1,661 digital-art tokens that will enable our readers to get deep into our universe with exclusive access to experiences and limited edition products. To create the collection of original, one-of-a-kind art pieces, we curated a group of four artists whose work we find cutting-edge, inspiring, covetable, and just plain beautiful: graphics wizard Chuck Anderson, AI futurist REO, punk drawing master (and GQ contributor) Kelsey Niziolek, and anime-adjacent rising star Serwah Attafuah (also a GQ contributor). To guide their work, we issued a simple challenge to the quartet: create art that responds to GQ’s Change Is Good motto. Get to know these four artists as they explain how their practices are zooming into the future.
REO
The mysterious REO is a music producer and DJ who jumped headfirst into Web3 when he recognized the transformative potential of AI tools. Now, driven by his lifelong sense of synesthesia—when he hears music, he sees corresponding colors—REO is one of the most imaginative digital artists working today. About the AI illustration software he uses, he says, “Some people are afraid of what this means for artists. But I don’t believe any tool is either good or bad. It’s the person who is using it that steers it in a direction.”
GQ: How has the advent of the NFT space changed your art practice?
REO: For so long making digital art didn’t make you an artist…it made you a content creator. I was designing all kinds of stuff for musicians and brands and knew that I wanted to make money off of my own ideas, not just making stuff for others. NFTs really helped me to make that leap into making more of my own work and exploring ideas that maybe I would have given to someone else.
Can you explain how you used AI to accomplish these works, and what inspired the prompts you used?
I started with putting my own artwork into the software and then telling it to ideate on it by adding more descriptive words like “high fashion,” “futuristic sunglasses,” et cetera. The prompts were inspired by exploration really. I tried a bunch of stuff until I started to see a thread story-wise in who these people were and the world they all lived in. It’s been pretty amazing for someone like me who isn’t the best with words to start a story with images first.
What are some of the most interesting applications of AI programs like Midjourney that you’ve seen so far?
I’ve been seeing so many people who have no technical skill in drawing or any kind of digital art make really amazing works because the idea is incredible. To be able to use the AI to help bring an idea to fruition that you might not know how to make in “real life” is mind-blowing.
I have been creating a lot of interior design setups as well and I’ve always had a passion for it, despite not knowing the first thing about drawing in CAD or making a blueprint.
How does your digital artwork relate to your work as a music producer and DJ?
When I was making music for artists in the recording studio, most times while working on the song I would see what the album cover should look like, or maybe the whole music video, and sometimes even what the stage design could be like and what colors would be showing. Music and art are two halves of a whole for me because I’ve had synesthesia for as long as I can remember. I thought everyone could see colors when they heard music, but as I got older I realized that it was not an everyday thing.
You can usually catch me working on music and digital art at the same time, switching between both. It’s amazing because I think both sides of my brain are firing and I’m not overthinking things so much. If I’m not making music, then I’m usually digging—listening for music to play in my DJ sets. It’s been such a blessing to learn how to do both at the same time.
Kelsey Niziolek
A longtime GQ collaborator whose illustrations framed our first-ever summer-beach-reads issue, this is Kelsey Niziolek’s first project in Web3. In fact, her retro-futuristic graphic style—which combines the heavy shading of punk posters with the symbology of New Age healing centers and gothic churches—is created entirely by hand. (If you’re like us, you’ll want to make printouts of her work and march them right down to your local tattoo parlor.) For this project, Niziolek spent a lot of time with her digital scanner, but overall “it actually seemed to work really well with how I make my art,” she says.
GQ: What does Change Is Good mean to you?
Niziolek: With the risk of sounding cliché, change is unpredictable, but necessary to move forward in life and break out of the everyday cycle. Whether it turns out good or bad, it’s something that is worth taking the risk sometimes.
As someone who draws by hand, how did you approach creating generative digital art?
I basically drew a bunch of different pieces and layered them in a way that still resembles my usual artwork layouts. Each layer can be switched out with multiple drawings. So regardless of the final layout of the pieces being generated digitally, it still feels like my collection was more hand done than anything. It was also different for me to use more color than I normally do, but I was surprised by the results and really enjoyed the outcome.
How did you fall into your world of classically spooky iconography?
I’m not really sure, to be honest. I never tried to mold my aesthetic into something particular, it just happened. I guess I’ve always liked typically darker things. I have two older brothers, which definitely had a huge impact on my interests throughout my life, especially with music, movies, clothing, et cetera. I was also a Hot Topic kid growing up and ironically enough, some things never change.… I feel like sometimes my work reflects that.
What are you feeling inspired by lately?
Lately I’ve been inspired by old architecture, like church windows and iron gates that I see on the street. In general I’ve always loved old, intricate designs like that. I’ve recently found a lot of cool concrete step railings at Central Park as well. Many things I incorporate into my drawings are of pictures that I’ve taken outside.
Serwah Attafuah
To enter Serwah Attafuah’s unearthly cyber dreamscapes is to explore the young Aussie’s enthralling utopian imagination. For this surreal digital world, Attafuah—who has worked with the likes of Nike and Mercedes-Benz—created a series of “strong Afrofuturistic protagonists” who symbolize, she says, that change is within us.
GQ: How did you first “discover” the surreal landscapes you feature in your art?
Attafuah: I guess they were always with me in a way; it just took a long time to bring them to life! I’ve always had visions and dreams of worlds beyond, but lacked the skills to create them until I found digital art back in 2013. I’m inspired by Renaissance and rococo artworks, which I merge with Afrofuturistic and cyberpunk aesthetics.
Who or what inspired the female avatars in these works?
Growing up, I saw a lack of black and POC women and people on gallery walls, and even in the media in general. So I decided to give them space in my work. I call my avatars “abstractions or reflections of self,” meaning they represent parts of me although they look slightly different. I’ve also always loved anime and cartoons, so I sculpt my characters to resemble those styles.
How much further does the fashion industry have to go in terms of embracing the possibilities of digital art?
I feel like we are only starting to see some progress in embracing new technologies and digital art in the fashion world. I love Adidas for Prada’s collaboration with Zach Lieberman. Antoni Tudisco has been a long-standing icon in the digital art–fashion intersection, and I really love their work. I’d love to see more immersive digital experiences such as virtual fashion shows, digital installations in stores, and AR fashion moving forward.
Chuck Anderson
The sneakily influential graphic design work by Chuck Anderson has appeared across digital and print mediums for nearly two decades. In recent years, he’s collaborated with Apple, Nike, Google, The New York Times, and the Chicago Bulls, among others, who all call Anderson for his trippy color palette and deft employment of early internet aesthetics, a sensibility he developed through The Brilliance!, the dot-com-hall-of-fame blog he founded in 2005 with Virgil Abloh and Benjamin Edgar. “I’ve always been very obsessed with, and driven by, seeing what happens when you put things together that don’t seem like they belong,” Anderson says.
GQ: How does your digital artwork take shape, generally speaking?
Anderson: I’m a pretty impatient person. I need to be able to iterate quickly and efficiently when I make things or I’ll lose interest. Sketching, careful planning, and mapping work out can be incredibly difficult for me, as much as I romanticize being good at these practices sometimes. So, digital or not I tend to stick with a “just start making things” approach, and it’s in that digging and experimenting that something catches my eye, giving me some semblance of a foundation to work with. If I’m really starting with a blank slate, which was the case with this project, I’ve learned it’s super important that I give myself permission to mentally and creatively just wander around for a while until I bump into something that excites me.
Can you unpack some of the graphics that went into these digital collages?
Change Is Good made me think a lot about tension. Very personal experiences of joy and loss have been a big part of my life the last few years, so the idea of visualizing those emotions through intensely contrasting elements, colors, and techniques was important to me. I also wanted to explore how I could utilize every medium I know how to work with in this project. There are 15-plus years’ worth of my photography you can find throughout these pieces, hand-drawn images, revisited elements from old personal projects that felt right to revive, and a small amount of my own AI-generated visuals made specifically for this project. Throughout the collages you’ll find super colorful vibrance and a celebration of life and nature, flowers, trees, skies, suns, humanity. You’ll also find moments of darkness, gloom, cobwebs, grime, cold digital voids. I guess I like the honesty I feel in smashing all of this together. It feels very real to me right now; feels very alive, even the bleak moments.
How has Chicago—its communities, its physical and cultural structures—impacted your work?
So much of my Chicago experience was shaped in the early-mid 2000s by my relationships with Benjamin Edgar and Virgil Abloh and our work together on The Brilliance!, a blog we started together in 2005. Being in the Chicago suburbs at the time, we were all young kids just completely fascinated by the music, culture, and art of this city, the world, and the internet. Both of them really set the stage for what I saw as important here or why I take notice of things I might have otherwise not appreciated quite as much. I mean, it sounds kind of wild to say, but Virgil really made so many kids care about Mies van der Rohe who probably wouldn’t have cared. He literally inspired kids to get in their cars and drive one-and-a-half hours to fucking Plano, Illinois, to take selfies in the Farnsworth House…. I just, ha, I don’t know—I love that. It’s such a young, “now” way he managed to inspire a generation to care. What a master of juxtaposition he was. “Blending scenes,” as Benjamin likes to say, is such a great way to consider Chicago. This big, beautiful, chaotic, harsh, historic city in the middle of America. I love that. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
