‘Sayssiworld’ refers to the digital spirit world that creatures artistically inhabit. ‘Slollas’ {slah-luhz} live in the Sayssiworld and are their own language, each one of them an expression. They live alongside with other creatures like vavvas, vybanthers, and zhinxes.

What did you dream about last night?

Okay there was a massive theatre that was a part of the ocean; all the architecture was made of the moving and splashing waves, kind of roughly keeping their shapes of grand staircases and bleachers, and you had to kind of half climb half swim, I was supposed to find someone.

Can we start by you telling me a bit about how you came to discover your style and practice?

Definitely! I always drew and played guitar and was into ‘Lord of the Rings’ and things like that, and then in high school I had a band and I was into graffiti, I really liked hand styles. My friends and I talked slang, people being idiomatic in that way, kind of communication in general, but from more of a dumb young punk perspective. I always really loved languages, and how all different ones come with their own flavour and personality and psychology. AP art at my high school with Amy Bouse was kind of my first exposure to art outside of drawing and graffiti.

So, I think artistically at the time I was inspired by a lot of low brow street stuff and weird bands, and conceptually I was thinking about language and people and making up languages and building fantasies/worlds. Then at SAIC I had a couple of teachers who were really kind and cool (Jessica Westbrook, Chris Collins, Alfredo Salazar-Caro) who introduced me to the 3D world and a lot of artists making experimental work using new media. The art coming out of the new media was the department that definitely felt more relevant to what I was interested in than anything I had really seen before. It was a lot of playing with/making art with the fancy new toys they had: all the 3D software, 3D printers, virtual reality, video games, etc... I loved it, it felt like the future. I think that’s when I started to look for ways to combine all of the things I was working with - all the shapes I was making and slang we were speaking in and characters I was meeting and relationships I was thinking about. All of the shapes and musical riffs I made started to feel so personified, and they turned into sort of audiovisual-3D-graffiti-language creatures I was chilling with.

Around that time, I started to use the word sayssi to refer to all of these shape/riff creatures, and I started to think and flesh out the lore behind it. That evolved into the Sayssiworld, the spirit world that they all of the creatures inhabit. Then I moved back from Chi to LA after a lot of my friends and I convincing each other through phone calls that it was finally the time to throw down on our band/art collective. So, we started making music, and incorporating our inside jokes and made up characters into a more expanded universe in which the Sayssiworld now exists, called the Gooniverse. Our band is called Znzn Kanshan, and we release “packets”, which can contain anything from a recorded LP’s to art installations. so thats where I’m at now, making packets and fleshing out the mythology of the gooniverse, and playing in the Sayssiworld :)

You create abstract, unidentifiable beings with unearthly faces. What do these creatures represent? What inspires them?

!! They’re called slollas {slah-luhz}, and they live in the Sayssiworld. Slollas are their own language. Each one of them is an expression, like a drawing, musical riff, idea, memory, a sculpture, etc. There are other creatures in the sayssiworld too, like vavvas, vybanthers, and zhinxes. All the creatures in the sayssiworld are sentient individuals, but because they all communicate a unique feeling, their integration and unity is vital. The Sayssiworld is a place of things and events that are inexplicable, and the slollas sort of dance and compose themselves through their ups and downs in a variety of ways, playfully expressive and stylish or solemn and monastic, even orthopraxic.

You seem to work with multimedia a lot. Do you feel particularly connected to one creative medium or are they more intertwined for you?

Definitely more intertwined. Especially with Znzn Kanshan, where the media that we’re working with depends on the packet we’re releasing. But recently I’ve been making most of my slollas or commissioned pieces using oculus medium, I have unlimited fun drawing in VR.

What normally guides how these different mediums come to form your installations and environments?

One thing I love seeing is a set of different depictions of monsters or mythological creatures by different artists; and how seeing them together kind of gives you a sense of how the monster/creature looks in your own head, while you get to see at how it looks in other people’s heads, and it builds the lore. I think in that way, I like that the idea of building lore in the Sayssiworld and the gooniverse, and depicting the slollas or goontrappers in a variety of ways to keep their souls alive, like sometimes rendering them in blender, or making them in photoshop, or drawing them by hand, or making them out of sculpy, etc. That’s also me wanting to try new things and not get too deep in my screen which I stay doing

Do you see your art as having a wider message, amongst the landscape of artistic debates?

Not necessarily, but I like to think of the Sayssiworld as something that’s as convoluted as our own world, and I hope that there are Sayssi moments that are abstract and maybe foreign, but make you feel spiritual, or heavy, or connected to something. On the low key though my message is to be nice and to like stuff

What are your thoughts on the future of your creative industry? How do you think this will be remoulded or progress over time?

I think more people making art for themselves and their friends, which is dope. The more people there are and the more work that’s out there, I think the more people shy away from mainstream in order to participate in scenes that are niche or small and therefore more self-sustainable. I think it all has a lot to do with identity as well, and how we define ourselves based on our interests and niches these days, our avatars, which comes with a lot of problems, but I think also opens up the opportunity to engage with things that are less orthodox and more dope.

If your work had a soundtrack, what would it be?
Bahaha. Znzn kanshan <3 The music of the gooniverse

What’s next for you?

So me and znzn gang have been making up lore and mythology for the gooniverse and the sayssiworld for like 6 years, and we’ve only been a band for like 1 years, so our task now is to disseminate all of that information (what the gooniverse is, what goes on in it, who and what lives in it, how the physics of the gooniverse works, that +more) into accessible / intelligible / dope media. We made a video called called Tumby about a fruit from the gooniverse, which was sort an experiment with how we would present this type of information, and we had a lot of fun making it, so that led us Stangpoint, our new idea for how we want to go about presenting all of this lore and information. Stangpoint is basically a newscast from the perspective of newscasters that live in the gooniverse, broadcast to creatures that live in the gooniverse. Through regularly released Stangpoints we’ll continue to build the lore for our audience in a way that hopefully makes you want to dive in, while we continue to release packets.

This is a very stressful time to be a young creative. What keeps you motivated and creative? What advice would you give to young creatives right now to keep them motivated?

Honestly my homies, like the feeling that I get of staying up all night at a sleepover with your best friend when you’re 8 and invested in something really hilarious; that's the feeling that I get when I’m making slollas, or content with Znzn Kanshan. I think it really gives me energy. And it’s fun and therapeutic to give that much weight to silly inside jokes and language we make up. The mighty engine powered by the life juice of friendship that screams lightning into the sky and then casts it down upon our names. As far as advice: I like remembering that all of the people I look up to are huge babies and that I can be a huge baby too / it’s easier to take breaks from things that you need to take breaks from if you mentally prepare yourself a few days in advance / don’t look at your phone for an hour after you wake up, make sure you get 1 thing done first and then you will feel like a baller the rest of the day, and you program your brain to look at your phone less / Think of your brain like your younger less mature self that you have to be nice to and patient with / never miss an opportunity to not say something / make an effort to have fun / always eat the bigger half of your sandwich first.

You feel me?