Sandbox of the Infinite: DeltaSauce's Latent Space Explorations

by @Justinwetch

"I'm just leaving."

DeltaSauce handed his keys to the front-end manager at the grocery store where he'd been grinding out 90-hour weeks through COVID. She asked if she wanted her to call the store director. "No," he said. And walked out forever.

It was May 2022. His mother had finally convinced him to jump: "If this is what you truly love, go pursue it."

"Without her, I probably wouldn't have jumped off the deep end," DeltaSauce tells me. "I'm always that kind of guy that doesn't like taking risks."

But here's the thing about DeltaSauce: he's been jumping into new worlds his whole life. From the trailer parks of Lakeland, Florida, to the infinite possibilities of latent space, he's made a career of building escape portals into nostalgia.

"I grew up in Lakeland, Florida. I went to four different elementary schools."

DeltaSauce's childhood was perpetual motion. New trailer every year. Homeschooled through kindergarten and first grade, which "stunted my growth as a human being", entering regular school without knowing how to be around other kids. Hurricane seasons meant boarding up windows and hunkering down.

But there was one constant: his father's workshop. DeltaSauce would help build chairs and tables, learning craftsmanship through sawdust and sanding. His dad would hand him leftover wood scraps. "Build something out of them," he'd say. This lesson, that remnants could become art, would echo through everything DeltaSauce would later create.

They had another ritual: watching something together every single day. One film or TV episode. Star Wars Episode I in theaters (despite it being "probably the worst Star Wars"). Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Jurassic Park. Back to the Future. His father loved disaster films, Roland Emmerich spectacles where the world ended in spectacular ways. "They are so out of touch with reality," DeltaSauce laughs, "but I absolutely love them."

"My aesthetic is my narrative, and my narrative is nostalgia."

DeltaSauce bristles when people try to pin down his visual style. His aesthetic can change, evolve, shift with new tools and techniques. But the narrative thread, that yearning for something lost, something that maybe never was, remains constant.

In 2022, after walking out of that grocery store, DeltaSauce dove fully into NFTs and digital art. But the real transformation began with a collection called Memories. "The most difficult collection to work on from an emotional level," he calls it. He pulled out family photo albums. Started using his childhood pictures as inspiration. Each image was a portal back to trailer parks, to countless hours spent alone, to Saturday morning cartoons on a CRT TV.

Working with @0009ine as curator, DeltaSauce learned to walk the line between universal and personal nostalgia. "Everyone's seen a picture of a bike," 0009 would tell him. "How do you tie it back to your own narrative?" So that bike had to be outside his specific trailer. That TV had to be in his specific living room. The mundane made intimate.

"It was very traumatic to a certain extent," DeltaSauce admits. "You're presenting 'this is where I grew up, this is my trailer park, this is me working with my dad.' This is all of that wrapped up into a collection of art."

His father haunts these pieces. Twenty years absent but somehow more present in the work than his mother, who he sees daily. "I want to still carry that connection to him, in the good times, in the good memories," DeltaSauce explains. The art becomes a bridge across two decades of silence.

But nostalgia, DeltaSauce knows, is a liar. "We always assume nostalgia is our best moments. But as we get older, those rose-tinted glasses start to break down." You realize your parents went into the other room to fight. You understand why they left you alone with your toys. "There's a lot of darkness hidden behind our childhood."

Creating Memories was "like bloodletting," he says. "You're draining all that emotion out into the internet and then you're empty."

Everything changed when DeltaSauce saw his digital art become physical.

From Dusk Till Dawn was his first collection of oil paintings: six pieces depicting one night in a small suburban town. But these weren't painted by human hands. A robotic plotter at MATR Labs translated his digital visions into actual oil on canvas. When DeltaSauce traveled to Tuxedo, New York, to witness Idyllic Street being created, he was "flabbergasted."

"It looks like an oil painting... the textures scream that it's an oil painting but it's done by a machine, and there's a beauty behind that."

Standing before it drying on the wall, DeltaSauce had a revelation: "There's something different about physical art versus art on a screen." Physical pieces "command the room" in a way pixels never quite could.

This experience sent him on a new obsession: texture. How to make digital art feel tangible, even when it could never be touched.

The answer came partly through an installation he built in Marfa: six old CRT televisions displaying modern digital art. The screens created "weird artificial glitchiness," scan lines and static giving digital work a physical quality. This aesthetic became the seed for Feed, his surveillance-state nostalgia collection.

"I was born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore space, but born just in time to explore latent space."

DeltaSauce doesn't just prompt in English. He prompts in Klingon, Elvish, binary equations. "I want to be that explorer," he says. "I want to see where the models take me."

His collections become expeditions. Views: windows into other realities where the viewer is the only presence. Issues: fictional magazine brands, each tied to historical dates, inspired by his father's love of Omni Magazine. Each project pushes further into unexplored territory.

"I look at latent space as a place for exploration and play. It's the sandbox of the infinite. The only thing limiting you from exploring it is being creative. You're allowed to build in it. You're allowed to play."

He pauses, then drives it home: "It's tying back to being a child again. Latent space allows me to be a child again."

"I get the most validation not on the sale, but on the discussion around the artwork."

DeltaSauce tells me about @Airstrip__1, a collector who shared why he resonates with certain pieces. "It's like sitting around a campfire and sharing stories," DeltaSauce says. "That connection between what you're doing with the artwork and what they see in it."

His Issues collection is still minting after a year, by design. Daily auctions instead of instant sellout. "It's not meant to sell out... we wanted to mimic getting a new issue every week." The slow burn keeps conversation alive.

When I ask who inspires him lately, he lights up. @_sigmaX_’s granular textures. @blac_ai building out his Syncretica world through narrative. @andresdelvecc's hustle with physical paintings. "I respect his grind," DeltaSauce says, even though they disagree about robotic versus human painting.

Between our art talk, we digress into energy drinks. He's a Reign guy – 300mg of caffeine. "A little too much," he admits, trying to kick the habit. He's down 90 pounds, avoiding sweet tea and soda. These mundane details matter. They remind us that the explorer of infinite digital worlds still has a body, still needs breaks, still struggles with the same earthly concerns as anyone.

"My visual aesthetic can change. The tools change. But my narrative thread of nostalgia, that's what I'm always gonna pull from."

DeltaSauce is still building worlds from scraps. Only now, the scraps are infinite.

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Follow DeltaSauce @delta_sauce. For future episodes of the Weekly Dose of ART, DeltaSauce recommends @lineofakc, @justinaversano, and @BoredJosei.