From Stage to Source Code: P1A's Soup Theory

By @JustinWetch

"As a kid I really wanted to be an industrial designer. I wanted to create things."

Pia didn't always know she'd be an artist. She thought maybe a firefighter, maybe a police officer, because she admired how they took care of people. The mystery of not knowing appealed to her.

Then came sixth grade. An art teacher noticed something different about her work. While other kids made predictable collages, Pia looked at paper and saw eggshells. "I remember making cracked eggs with little chicks coming out. I looked at the paper and thought of eggshells, and that creative thinking stood out."

The teacher told her mother. That conversation changed everything.

Pia grew up in Izmir with a Turkish family from Crete Island, a multicultural upbringing that would shape her perspective. When high school came, she chose fine arts over a regular curriculum: sculpture, drawing, graphic design, art history instead of math. She became obsessed with contemporary design, dreaming of working at IKEA. She always created things, always drew and sketched, even when she couldn't see it as a career yet.

She applied to industrial design programs, but didn't pass the exam. Instead, she ended up in stage and costume design with puppetry, an incredibly niche program that would become what she calls her best loss.

The program gave her something industrial design never would have: rigorous discipline. "They never allowed any technology in our program. It was all hand drawing and painting." Watercolor, endless research, drawing until your hands cramped. Years later, working with code and AI, she still thinks like a stage designer trained in composition, framing, light and shadow. All those hours spent rendering costumes by hand taught her to see.

She didn't know it then, but failing that exam was the first ingredient in the soup.

Moving from Izmir to Istanbul felt like moving to New York. The metropolis energy hit different: twenty million people, crowded but lonely, lively and chaotic with a dreamlike instability that would influence everything she made.

Before even graduating, she worked as a costume design assistant on the historical TV series Establishment: Osman, Season 1. The scale of those productions convinced her that Türkiye could compete with Hollywood. She kept working through COVID when Her camera crew friends (working for Guy Richie’s production Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre) showed her the Beeple sale. 

"I was like, 'I don't have any idea what you're talking about.'"

But curiosity pulled her in. She took some commission drawings, spent months figuring it out, and set up a Twitter account through OpenSea's onboarding page. In August 2021, she minted her first NFT and started DMing people: "Hey guys, I'm Pia." Her friends in film called her Pia, so she kept it. There were barely ten YouTube tutorials at the time, but she studied and got it done.

"I think creativity is like soup. We're all delicious, niche soups: identity and beliefs are base ingredients, and everything we experience, travel, art, science, is like spices we throw in the pot."

This is how Pia thinks about making things. Your background and beliefs form the broth. Everything else is seasoning: movies, books, cities, film sets, blockchain whitepapers you stumble across during COVID. "You can make endless soups."

The key insight: there are no rules about which ingredients go together. No gatekeepers saying stage design can't mix with machine learning, that costume work can't inform generative art. "I love the motto 'Fuck around, find out.' Wander around, make mistakes, learn. That's how we roll."

Art isn't some protected space where only certain people with certain training get to play. Everyone has ingredients. Everyone can cook. The soup theory explains why she pulls from Renaissance paintings and terminal fonts, studies cave art and codes with AI assistance, creates work that feels like it comes from ten different centuries at once.

It's all just ingredients in the pot.

Pia was searching images when she found an old Venetian painting of a woman with no face. "I'm like, 'What the is that? This is super weird.'"

Research revealed the woman was wearing a Moretta mask, also called Muta, a black velvet mask held in place by biting a button inside. "This mask was held by the mouth. Women who wore this mask were not able to speak, therefore it was called 'Muta.' That makes so much sense for me."

Then she found a diary entry of Giovanni Grevembroch about how women who preferred to wear the Moretta mask evoked a unique sense of allure in Venetian social life, their faces hidden, their eyes the only part exposed. Communicating only through silent gaze, they created a quiet dialogue that deeply fascinates me as an artist and a costume designer."

Which brings her to ALPHABET. She turned 26 and something snapped. All these identity labels, all these pronouns, all this pressure to express and categorize and define. "ALPHABET came to life with me being so frustrated and so sick of this 'express who I am' game. She says, “As we change and shift with time, so those expressions and terms and naming of who I am or who I might become change and shift.”

So she created her own language, her own alphabet. "You cannot even speak it. Try it." It's a protest against the division disguised as diversity, against language that fragments instead of connects. "All those things that I use to describe myself, now I don't feel like they're reflecting who I am. I created ALPHABET. It's easier. It's really peaceful over there."

When Pia creates, she spends hours online absorbing images, waiting for something to click. Then when the composition appears in her mind, she shuts everything else off, never sketching, not wanting to know how it will end. Almost out of body. Pure instinct. The hand and soul collaborating while the brain steps aside.

For years, Pia was nomadic, painting from the back of a costume truck on film sets or on long flights. Then finally she had stability and got her first real setup with a big screen. She started writing code.

She got obsessed with AI, training her own data packs and learning machine learning. She began collaborating with AI, exploring terminal fonts and ASCII art. She had an idea: "What if I add my own font to this terminal? It worked. This is amazing."

She and the AI wrote scripts together, adjusting density, luminosity, and color values. The process was painstaking, taking endless time to perfect. Eventually the scripts started producing something unexpected: really pasty, weird images. She exported them as PNGs, discovering her current work style.

Then came her recent @Adobe collaboration. She was chosen as the demo artist for their Firefly project and designed a lamp: wood, Art Deco inspired, with a tiny Pia figure sitting on top. She calls it Project ID, envisioning it as functional furniture where art becomes affordable and accessible, blending into everyday life. Not art on a screen or a wall, but art you turn on when it gets dark.

Pia credits @artguy_eth as her earliest champion, someone who became a close friend and name-dropped her on SuperRare. She thanks @lotsofnfts and Max Karlan for supporting the alphabet project. Her current favorite artists include @SkiluxDesigns, @Jesperish, and @jarvinart.

When asked what she wishes people understood, Pia gets serious about the work behind art. "I would love them to understand that every job comes with hard work and discipline. Art is exactly that too." Creation is high-risk, high-reward, and there's a beautiful duality: artists sacrifice time and effort while collectors sacrifice capital. "Without artists and creators, there wouldn't be any market where capital goes and flows, and without collectors, there wouldn't be any demand; it is a beautiful duality."

She's blending more disciplines now, more perspectives: physical and digital, code and canvas, connection and fragmentation, language and silence. All ingredients in an ever-expanding soup.

For future episodes of the Weekly Dose of ART, Pia recommends @0xVestica, @esraeslen, and @SkiluxDesigns.

@P1AbyPIA was recommended by @samanthacavet.