About num1crush
#1 crush explores mythologies we’re building in real time — online, on-chain — fusing internet folklore, outsider art, and pop conspiracy. Blending psychedelic color with dense symbolism, #1 crush reflects a world shaped by invisible systems — financial, digital, and divine. This is crypto-mysticism at its most chaotic, in looping GIFs that feel both timeless and deeply online — part satire, part ritual. A digital folk tale for a world that’s glitching.
An interview with num1crush led by Carlo Borloni
Your work moves through a hybrid territory, blending meme language, digital spirituality, and psychedelic aesthetics. Where does this unique visual universe come from?
I think it comes from living online long enough to see memes turn into myths. My visual world is built from the language of the internet: the absurd, the funny, the broken, but I try to treat it with the same reverence as painting or poetry.
I’ve always felt that behind every meme there’s something sacred or emotional trying to surface, a kind of digital spirituality hidden inside the noise. The psychedelic aesthetic helps me translate that, it’s how I make the chaos visible, turn irony into devotion, and build a mythology for our screen-based lives.
The characters you create feel like mythical figures born from the chaos of the internet, saints, idols, or monsters of our time. How do you develop these visual identities?
They usually start as fragments... a meme, a glitch, a face I can’t unsee. I take these small pieces of digital culture and treat them like archeological finds from the internet age. Then I start reshaping them, mixing absurdity with reverence, until they become something mythic: saints, idols, or monsters that mirror the way we worship online.
Each character is built through repetition and transformation. I return to them again and again, mutating their forms, like they’re evolving through the feed itself. In the end, they become reflections of our collective hallucination, the mythic creatures born when culture, code, and emotion start to blur.
The GIF format, with its endless loop, plays a central role in your practice. What draws you to this medium and the way it captures the viewer’s attention?
The loop feels ritualistic to me. Unlike a static image, a GIF traps its subject in an eternal moment... it never resolves, it just keeps breathing. That repetition turns absurdity into ceremony. I love that tension: it’s hypnotic, funny, and a little tragic. The loop becomes a kind of digital prayer, something you can’t look away from, because it never truly ends.
Many of your images oscillate between irony and sacredness, between the comedic and the mystical. How do you navigate this tension in your creative process?
I think that tension is the space I work in. The internet taught us to laugh at everything, even at what hurts or moves us, so irony became our defense mechanism, but also our language. I try to use that humor as a way in, and then slowly twist it toward something sincere, even spiritual.
For me, the sacred often hides inside the absurd. When you loop a meme long enough, it stops being funny and starts to feel like a chant, that’s the moment I’m after, when laughter turns into belief.
Your work fuses elements of popular culture, digital folklore, and conspiratorial imagery. How do you select the symbols or references that become part of your pieces?
I treat symbols like living organisms, they drift through culture, mutate, and pick up new meanings along the way. I collect them the same way a folklorist might gather myths: by paying attention to what keeps resurfacing in the collective imagination.
Conspiracies, memes, luxury logos, mystical diagrams, they all come from the same impulse to explain what feels larger than us. I choose what resonates intuitively, what feels charged. Then I recombine those fragments until they form a new kind of digital folklore, one that reflects both our paranoia and our longing for meaning.
Transformation is a strong component in your figures, smiles become encrusted, bodies distort, icons mutate. What meaning do you attach to this continuous metamorphosis?
Transformation is everything. In the digital world, nothing stays still... images evolve, identities melt, and meaning constantly shifts. I see that instability as the essence of our time.
When I distort or encrust a figure, it’s like revealing the pressure of the network on the body: how desire, irony, and attention reshape us. The mutations are both grotesque and beautiful; they show how we’re all being remade by the systems we inhabit. In a way, the metamorphosis is the myth itself, the ritual of becoming something new, over and over again.
You use AI tools as an integral part of your process. For you, where is the boundary between artistic control and generative unpredictability?
I see AI as a collaborator, unpredictable, chaotic, sometimes wrong in exactly the right way. The boundary between control and chance is where the real magic happens. I guide the machine, but I also let it surprise me.
I’m not interested in perfection or automation, I’m interested in dialogue. AI expands the field of imagination, but it’s still my hand, my taste, my mythology shaping the outcome. It’s like casting a spell: you set the ritual, but you never fully know what spirit will appear.
Your works seem to construct a kind of contemporary mythology for digital civilization. How do you think the internet is producing new myths and visual rituals?
The internet is the new myth machine. It takes small human impulses: fear, humor, desire, and amplifies them until they become collective symbols. Every meme, every viral image is a kind of ritual act; it spreads, mutates, and gathers belief through repetition.
We used to gather around fires to share stories, now we gather around screens. The heroes have changed shape; they speak in loops, JPEGs, and code. What fascinates me is how quickly irony turns into faith online. A joke becomes a movement, an image becomes a shrine. That’s the mythology I’m trying to trace: the sacred hidden inside the scroll.
You’ve exhibited internationally and are part of important collections. How do you perceive the evolution of AI art and these visual languages within the current art landscape?
I think we’re watching a new visual language being born in real time. AI art began as a tool, but it’s quickly becoming a movement, not just about technology, but about perception, authorship, and collective imagination.
What excites me is how fluid it is. It dissolves the boundaries between painter, coder, and curator. The aesthetics are still mutating, from surrealism to glitch to hyperpop, but the deeper shift is cultural. AI is forcing art to face the question of what creation really means in an age where images can dream.
For me, it’s not about replacing the artist... it’s about expanding the myth of what an artist can be.
If someone were to discover this series a hundred years from now, how would you like it to be interpreted? What kind of imprint would you like to leave on the history of digital imagery?
I’d like it to feel like a time capsule of our collective hallucination, proof that even in the noise of the internet age, we were searching for meaning, beauty, and connection.
If someone finds these works a century from now, I hope they see them as modern relics, fragments of digital spirituality from a moment when humans and machines were learning to dream together.
More than anything, I’d want the work to speak of emotion, that behind all the irony, code, and spectacle, there was still a pulse.
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