He was walking down a street when the word arrived. "Man, that place feel like nowhere," he remembers thinking. It stuck. He spent a long time trying to shake it, coming up with other names and going back. He needed a name that wasn't his own, and this was the one that wouldn't leave.

The place he meant is where he was raised, his mother's hometown, mostly desert. Not dunes, he clarifies. Pretty empty.

His profile picture has the same problem. It's the first thing he ever made in Photoshop and he still hasn't replaced it, though he's tried. "If someday somebody make a PFP for me that I can replace it," he says, laughing, "I would be so happy."

He was four or five when he started drawing, because he wouldn't stop crying and his father bought him a sketchbook. He drew the same picture over and over. Hills, a house, himself, his parents, a sun that had to be there, clouds around it.

“I wouldn't stop crying until my father buying me a new sketch book.”

"Desert and cloud is my obsession."

Twenty-four years later, they're still there.

No0where is Iranian, born in 1998 and raised there, and he has been trying to leave for a few years. He goes out, he comes back. For now he's staying until his mother is better. He's anonymous online, which is not an aesthetic choice.

The computer that shaped his life arrived by accident when he was six. His father had been working for a man who refused to pay him, and took a PC instead of wages. This was around 2003, when almost nobody he knew had one.

His father also did coloring work, and the shop was covered in it. Thick layers of paint everywhere. He can still find it in his own images. "When I draw night sky and want to draw a galaxy, you can see that smear of colors together," he says. "That's something very early on in my subconscious."

The family was middle class until a run of severe inflation. His teenage and college years were spent in real poverty, and he describes it without drama. "My heart was full of hope," he says. "I think if people have everything from the start, there is no motivation to going to better places."

He studied software engineering because he wanted to make games and there was no path to it where he lived. "There wasn't chance you can do game stuff for real. But I was so stubborn."

During the war, his internet went out for three months. For someone whose livelihood is digital art sold on chain, that's close to a death sentence. He paid a few hundred dollars a week for VPNs to stay connected. Posting once on X cost him a few hundred dollars a month 

There's an assumption he'd like corrected.

"People thinking that with you living in Iran with such a worse currency, you have to be good," he says. "No, I spending dollars here, like real American you should spend here." Buying a place in Tehran, he says, is roughly buying a place in Brooklyn.

His position on the war is not simple. He has no affection for his government. "This government make my life worse than I thought. So I'm no fan of them." The planes came anyway.

"When they come up from your head, like as you sleeping and you waking up with some Israeli fighter coming by your head, it's something crazy," he says. He'd go up to the roof and watch them pass, one after another. 

The worst thing that happened to him during the war had nothing to do with the war.

"In the middle of the war, I have my deepest mental breakdown, but not for the war, because my lover left me."

He lost the relationship and, in the same stretch, daily contact with people he loved and worked alongside. What made it worse is how his creativity runs. Depression is usable as material and impossible to work inside.

"I can get inspiration from it, but I cannot make it when I'm depressed," he says. "And when I'm not making, I'm so sad."

A good piece can keep him happy for weeks, which he recognizes as both gift and problem. "It's a curse."

Underneath it is the thing he says most plainly.

"I always feeling lonely. Like I don't know why."

You can see it in the pictures. There is nearly always one figure. When there are two, something has gone wrong between them. "You can see they are losing connection or something weird happened to them," he says. His own relationship was long distance, weeks of waiting between visits, and he thinks his subconscious moved that onto the canvas.

Then he widens it into something about everyone. "People sometimes deeply in love together, but not seen together, and use their phone to connect together. And that's some sort of separation and connection in the same time."

He's through the worst of it now, working every day.

He calls the work sci-fi surrealism, illustrated in a clear line style. He builds most pieces in 3D and draws over the top. There are a great many cubes, and usually a person alone. "I always draw spaces like I think people in future, this consciousness can upload it to the cloud," he says. "You being alone in the clouds, in computers."

Moebius is the obvious ancestor and he gets there before anyone can accuse him. "I'm very much inspired by Moebius works, like you can tell, but not in the level you think. I'm not copying him. I'm making my works, my own world, but I love what he did." Add Syd Mead, Giger, Frazetta, and every Studio Ghibli film.

His most recent collaboration took about sixty-two hours and roughly sixty-two thousand individual lines, drawn by hand in Procreate. He counted them. "Something that make me very happy is just drawing good lines."

The tools came slowly. Photography, then After Effects, then Blender learned on a borrowed laptop with no graphics card, which meant overnight sessions at a friend's shop to use a better machine. ZBrush became the one he stopped having to think about. "The ZBrush is like playing guitar for me. It's subconscious."

Composition went the same way. He studied the fundamentals obsessively, then stopped consulting them. "Right now I purely work with my eyes."

Which brings him to the argument he most wants to make. Anyone can open the free version of ChatGPT, type a prompt with Moebius in it, and get something that looks right. He says this without bitterness. What's left is attachment.

"When you deeply attach to some composition or some idea, people can see that, maybe cannot tell it, but they feel it."

His career reads as a sequence of rescues, each arriving at the exact bottom. He minted his first pieces on Tezos in 2022, after the boom was over, and nobody bought them. Then one night a collector called Compact kompakd bought everything he had. "Man, who are you?" Months later Xer0x_xyz commissioned him alongside artists who are now legends. A friend Ogtheperson talked him onto Ethereum, bought the first one, and the work sold faster than he could believe. That lasted a year.

Then the market fell apart. His genesis piece on SuperRare sat unsold at a moment when he couldn't name anyone selling anything. So he wrote a very long, very desperate email to 6529, and they chose him to make a meme card.

He's noticed the shape of it. "Always when I thinking, yeah, that's it, I'm fucked up, I cannot go anymore, and then something happen," he says. "I think I should get desperate at deepest level until something good happen."

There's a graveyard on his hard drive of pieces he loved and abandoned when the feeling left. The ones made without deliberation, he's noticed, are what people connect to hardest. "When you think about it so much, it ruins the magical moment of it."

The day before we spoke he finished his first book cover. "It's like a lifetime thing to do, and someone trusting me with that is very special for me."

What he wants eventually is to make things for children. "Adult life is fucked up," he says. "And if they can't enjoy their childhood, life is full of hard moment and the moment that break your heart. So the thing that keep you going is having some good memories in your childhood."

He is, by his own account, happier now than he has been. "Any amount of ETH you give me, I don't give you my passion."

He got the segment backwards, which turned out better. Told he could recommend three things, he took it as an invitation to be recommended to. Put me on a movie, he said. Put me on a concert.

The third wasn't a request. "I love rooftop. I create art always in a rooftop nowadays. Like higher the better."