The Nostalgia Architect: Olivia Pedigo's Liminal Dreamscapes

By @JustinWetch

"I create bedrooms for memories I never had."

Olivia Pedigo tells me this two hours into our afternoon conversation, laughing at her own insight. She toggles between accidental wisdom and genuine surprise like it's second nature, saying something quietly profound, then stopping to laugh: "Wait, that's kind of deep."

This captures everything about Pedigo's approach to art. She's building dreamy digital bedrooms that thousands recognize as home without ever having been there. She channels '90s nostalgia despite being born in 2000. She's become a vessel for shared digital memories while insisting she has no idea what she's doing.

The Accidental Alchemist

Olivia Pedigo never meant to become an artist. In 2019, she was a University of Florida student majoring in public relations. "It sounded kinda easy," she shrugs.

A required Adobe Creative Suite class was just another box to check. But when the class ended, she'd already paid for the full year subscription. "I was like, wait, this is kind of interesting. I might as well keep using it and see what I can make."

Friends started calling her "the designer." When someone asked if she could do something she'd never tried, she said yes and figured it out later. She was working a soul-sucking design job when she discovered 3D. "I saw this artist, No Paradigms, do an interview where he said Blender was free. I was like, 'Wait, that's crazy.'"

The first attempt at Blender's famous donut tutorial nearly killed her computer. She abandoned it for a year. When she returned in 2020, something clicked. By 2021, she was creating impossible spaces that existed somewhere between memory and half-remembered dream.

"I never thought I would be able to make a career out of what I was doing," she says. "I was just exploring."

What changed everything were early believers. Collectors like @Winnie_NFT and his wife @gmarz010, who started collecting her Liv's World pieces in 2022 and continue supporting her today. These early votes of confidence transformed exploration into possibility.

The Internet's Daughter

The most disorienting thing about Olivia Pedigo's work is its temporal displacement. Her pieces pulse with perfect '90s atmosphere: translucent iMacs melting into seafoam carpet, plasma lamps casting alien glows, spaces that feel lifted from magazines that stopped printing before she could read.

"I wasn't even alive in the '90s," she laughs. "But a lot of my work is representative of that time."

This isn't simple nostalgia. "I'm definitely happier now than I ever was as a kid. I was angsty as a kid. We make everything so nostalgic, but when you were living through it, it wasn't. You were miserable."

Her work interrogates this contradiction. Why do we mourn moments we once wished would end? Why do the hardest days look softer in hindsight? Why does she feel homesick for a home that was already gone when she arrived?

"I like to question why we place so much importance on the past," she says. Then, with characteristic self-awareness: "I feel like the same person I was at five. It's all cycles."

"I believe in the collective consciousness," she tells me, "especially now more than ever with the internet."

She's a conductor for collective digital memory. "The spaces I create are figments of memory, jumbled up with everything I've seen on the internet, combined in one. It's a nowhere place that exists in all of our memory. And I'm just translating that."

Meeting the Machine Halfway

I've always loved the filmlike grain and rich analogue texture in her imagery. "I don't use the denoiser in Blender," Pedigo explains, describing one of her many interesting creative choices. In 3D art, noise [the unresolved digital static ] is typically seen as a flaw. Pedigo sees it differently.

"I see this process as me and the computer meeting halfway."

She describes working on "Dollhouse," how her MacBook struggled with the hair rendering and carpet textures. Instead of seeing limitations, she saw collaboration.

"Sometimes I have no idea how something's gonna turn out, but you give it a try anyway, and it ends up being really beautiful," she says. "Like a photo discovered in ruins."

This philosophy extends beyond technical choices. She works without storyboards or rigid plans, letting her intuition guide the way.

"I like to give the computer room to do its thing," she says. 

As we discuss this, her dog, Roo, chimes in with a barrage of barks. "Sorry," she laughs. "He's been crazy today." Even interruptions become part of the rhythm.

Recently, Pedigo released a short film titled Dreamscapes (collected by nicedayjules on @SuperRare), a 3D animation that explores the journey of falling asleep and the cyclical nature of dreams. Modeled on the stages of REM, the piece drifts from light, fragmented moments into deeper, surreal textures that reflect a drift into the subconscious. When I mention a cinematic move she uses, a dolly zoom, she laughs. She hadn’t realized it had a name. “I'm not like a film nerd or anything,” she says. The moment lands like so much of her work: a visual instinct that arrives ahead of any technical explanation. 

Things We Outgrow, Then Don’t

"I don't really like to say that I'm making 'girlie' art or whatever," Pedigo tells me. "Because then people are just like, ‘Okay, she's making girly things,’ and they write you off."

"As women you are taught to perform a little bit," she reflects. "You're constantly thinking about how people perceive you, especially in online spaces."

When I ask if she’s always been drawn to feminine aesthetics, Pedigo pauses. "Honestly, not necessarily," she says, describing how she cycled through tomboy and boho phases before arriving at her current all-black uniform. What draws her to softness now, she explains, isn't trend or irony, but something deeper: comfort. "You grow up with things like Hello Kitty and pastels," she says. "You find a kind of friend in those things."

Today, her relationship to that aesthetic feels more emotional than stylistic.

"Do I really like it or am I just part of my environment?" she asks. "I don't know. And I don't think I'll ever know."

This uncertainty becomes subject matter. Her soft worlds carry hard questions about identity performance, authenticity in digital space, the impossibility of knowing where real self ends and adaptation begins.

"I say 'like' too much," she mentions repeatedly during our talk, worried about her verbal tics. The irony isn't lost: self-consciousness about how she presents herself while creating art about performed identity.

"Is anything we do really authentic?" she wonders. "Or is it all just reactions to our environment?" The pink rooms hold this question without answering it.

Bedrooms Without Bodies

Every Olivia Pedigo bedroom is empty. No figures, no self-portraits, just evidence of living: rumpled sheets, glowing screens, those accumulated cans. The occasional arm or hand is the most of the human form we usually see in her work. When I ask why, she thinks for a moment.

"I feel myself as an observer," she says finally. "I'm always on the outside looking in."

Her spaces are built from collective memory where any viewer might project themselves. The absence is invitation rather than emptiness.

"It's a diary without a main character," I suggest.

"Yeah," she laughs, "That's so real."

We talk about how this connects to her larger practice. The unmade bed could be anyone's bed. The glowing laptop could hold anyone's tabs. By removing the specific, she creates space for the universal.

"If you went into my environments, you'd probably be like, 'Ugh, what is this?'" she jokes. But that's precisely the point. These rooms aren't designed for physical occupation. They're memory vessels, emotional architectures, spaces that exist most fully in recognition rather than reality.

The Vessel

As our conversation winds down, Pedigo worries aloud. "I feel like I literally talked to you for two hours and gave you nothing."

But she's given me more than enough. Her insights slip in sideways, unannounced, then sit with you for days, with characteristic unpretentious humility. They echo her art: carefully constructed spaces that reveal themselves through liminal recognition, not explanation. Her entire practice rejects the idea that art must proclaim, must take positions, must build monuments to individual vision. Instead, she offers something rarer: spaces for not knowing.

"Sometimes I have no idea what exactly I'm holding," she says about calling herself a vessel. "But I know it is something, and it's trying to say something."

When I ask about artists who inspire her current work, she mentions @nicedayJules, @joepease, and @jakejfried. "They're all doing such interesting things with digital space," she says. The connections make sense. Artists who blur boundaries, who make the digital feel human.

It feels fitting that her final reflections return us to the contradictions that animate everything before.

"This is what's wrong with us," she says about society’s nostalgia addiction, then adds with perfect timing: "It's kinda funny."

"If nothing is real," she concludes, "then everything is real."

Her dog barks one last time. Somewhere, in a bedroom that exists only in the collective psyche, a laptop screen glows with Jersey Shore on mute. The empty space waits, patient as a screensaver on loop, waiting for you to recognize it as a home you never had.

Find Olivia Pedigo's work at @oliviapedi. For future Weekly Dose of ART features, she suggests: @haydclay, @bagdelete, and @razDoesArt. Olivia was recommended by @connorgrasso_.