Embrace the Hallucination: MACBETH's Bizarre Surrealism

MACBETH recently found an old Mead No Rules school folder, which was, in his words, "whatever the Lisa Frank aesthetic was for most boys." On it is a chart: classmates' names, and how much each one owed him for a drawing of a Mortal Kombat fighter or a Looney Tunes character.

"So I remember that's, like, from fifth grade I was selling art to kids on the playground," he says.

He drew constantly, always in ballpoint, because he "despised" the way pencil smeared. He copied from Marvel comic trading cards and never really read the comics. "It was just always for the art." Jim Lee was his favorite artist, and the villains were his favorite subjects for how dark they looked, Magneto most of all. He's noticed that the deep purples of those characters never left him. Purple still runs through his work.

He was raised by his mom, who wasn't ever a trained fine artist but pushed art appreciation and architecture hard, Frank Lloyd Wright above all. He credits her with his feel for lines, shapes, and composition.

In high school he spent a summer volunteering in South Africa and Kenya, and he brought his first film camera. After a year of college, he left on a Mormon mission to Greece and Cyprus for two years, with a camera always on him.

He'd grown up on snowboarding magazines and figured he could become a snowboard photographer, so he studied photography at the University of Utah and spent his winters shooting friends and strangers on the slopes. The fine art program taught what he calls "farmers market art," but it gave him something better: the darkroom.

"Think of Photoshop before Photoshop," he says. Dodging, burning, layering, collaging, and every effect he'd later find in software, he learned by hand. It started an era of pure experimentation that he says he's still in, and it gave him the line he'd most like quoted.

"Always experiment, always explore, and just keep creating. Don't pigeonhole yourself or your creativity. If your art is comfortable, you're not pushing it enough."

He graduated in the 2008 recession with an art degree and no job, so he moved to Japan for many years to teach English and art in public schools. He never lived in Tokyo, only small rural island towns, and that's where he got into vaporwave, the ironic nostalgia of malls, elevator music, and neon pastels. Everyone thinks of Japan as high tech, he says, "but really many of the rural areas felt as if they were still in the '90s."

Then he moved to Portland and landed his first art job, art director for a wedding supply company, then a quilting company. "Really boring, but hey, I'm using art."

Around 2016 he found Beeple's early work and a run of Cinema 4D tutorials and thought, "Whoa, I think I could do that." He dove in, running a pirated copy of Cinema 4D on "a really crappy laptop." He couldn't render the glossy chrome realism of artists like FVCKRENDER, so he went where his machine could follow: clean geometry, grainy VHS nostalgia, square white tiles. By 2019 that had carried him into the Backrooms and liminal spaces.

A few years ago, minting on Tezos, he went looking for something different and found it in his own past. He started rendering the Mormon temples and churches of his childhood as Backrooms. "I've been in all of those buildings and all the situations when they're empty," he says.

Around the same time, "cabal" was all over his timeline, thrown around whenever the digital art world had drama. "I thought in my head, 'Oh, you guys don't know anything about cults or cabals or whatever, people in power.'" Much of his work since has carried religious undertones drawn from that parallel.

Growing up, if you broke the rules, the neighborhood found out, gossiped, and shut you out. "You could be shunned for drinking iced tea or coffee," he says. "It's unbelievable." An organization can tell you you're free to choose, he says, when you may not actually have that freedom at all.

He struggles to describe his own work. "Bizarre surrealism" is the best he can do. What he wants is easier to name: a viewer thinking, "Wait, what?"

"The number one job as an artist that uses AI tools (as well as other tools) is curation," he says.

He starts with a setting, an abandoned church or a subway station, and generates until something fits. From there it branches like a tree, and when a branch goes somewhere undesirable, he traces back and tries another. He doesn't write detailed prompts. He'd rather have the randomness of older models, which he says the newer ones have lost.

The weirdness is what drew him in. While everyone else was mocking AI for the extra fingers, he wanted more. "I say, give me more fingers or give me more eyeballs, give me more of that bizarre look because that's what's making it awesome."

A still might start as something simple, a skeleton with a fish in the sky. He'll make twenty versions, run them through custom upscalers that add hallucinations of their own, layer all twenty in Photoshop, mask out his favorite parts, and then run that layered collage back through the models again, rinse and repeat. He loves that stage, because it takes him back to photo editing.

He doesn't try to steer through latent space. "I embrace the hallucination or the bizarreness of the latent space," he says. If the model goes left when he wanted right, he follows it. "If I wanted to direct it, then I would go back to 3D art."

His series In Your Dreams sends a tiny drone racing through room after empty room. When he posted it on Instagram, thousands of comments said some version of the same thing: I think I've seen this in my dream. He named the series after these comments. His own dreams, he says, are "extremely boring." "So apparently people are dreaming like my art, but yet I've never dreamed in my art."

HYDRO_VOID does the same with whirlpools and holes in the water. Both series, he's realized, are full of water, and he suspects a buried fear of deep water or a house flooding.

At its peak his Instagram reached more than 200,000 followers, and one post passed 200 million views. Then he burned out on the scheduling and the perfect grid, and slowed down his daily posting. He posts whatever he wants now, his numbers are "dismal," and he's never made a dollar from Instagram anyway. "It's the most freeing feeling ever to not worry about the likes and everything."

The next shift started with his kid. At immersive museums like Mercer Labs in New York, he watched how much more kids love art they can step inside. Then a show at Pier 59, with DJs and VJs working a hundred-foot screen together, left him and his friends stunned.

At Marfa in 2025 he saw nicedayjules's three screens of flowers and asked how it was done. "Okay, next year instead of me putting my bizarre loop on a frame TV in someone's gallery here, I'm gonna try to make an immersive experience." He spent the following year working with Art Blocks, and at this year's Marfa weekend he staged a laser show.

When people at the laser show asked what it meant, he told them about his Mormon upbringing and how the show abstractly represented elements of Mormon cosmology. Next year he wants to make that the whole point: something that conveys what the temple felt like without replicating it, spiritual even though he doesn't consider himself spiritual. "It's such a dichotomy of weird but extreme spirituality."

First, The Fall, by Tarsem, and his earlier film The Cell. "Modern surrealism at its finest."

Second, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's soundtrack for The Social Network. "Just give that soundtrack a full straight listen, and you might vibe with it."

Third, get out and try to ski or snowboard this winter, even if it's your first time. "It's quite an experience to glide on snow, and it can be so freeing."