DESCENDING INTO THE DIGITAL UNDERWORLD, ONE HELLSCAPE AT A TIME, WITH THE PHANTOM ARCHITECT OF AI DREAMSPACE
VNDERWORLD isn’t a brand, it’s geography. It’s a psychic sprawl of chaos-born cathedrals where prompts become portals, nightmares flirt with beauty, and the sacred gets spit-polished into the obscene. A mythology rendered in pixels, soaked in distortion. Behind the curtain is Steve—aka Griz—a Portland-bred renegade who almost walked away from it all. Raised in the feedback loop of Santa Cruz’s skate decks, spray paint baptisms, death metal riffs, and cracked pavement rebellion, he was always building temples out of trash and subculture.
Then life happened. That slow bleed into conformity. A “real job,” creative silence, a numbness that felt like safety. But that itch, the one real artists can’t amputate, never left. The pandemic ripped the bandages off. Paintbrushes re-emerged. Rug tufting turned into ritual. Then came the descent: AI. First Midjourney. Then DreamStudio. Then deep, obsessive trenches with Stable Diffusion on local machines. It wasn’t just a return to art, it was possession. Terabytes of imagery spilled out, not as practice but purging. What others dismissed as noise, Steve weaponized into vision. That’s when VNDERWORLD was born.
The rupture came in July 2022, not with a whisper but a siren: 999 LVRKERS detonated across the crypto-art scene like a molotov lobbed into the gallery walls of AI’s polished predictability. Brutal, feverish, unrelenting. It was anti-aesthetic in the most beautiful way, an antidote to the dopamine-scrolling softcore of mainstream AI. From there, VNDERWORLD veered away from the factory floors of generative clones and hype-fueled PFPs, sinking instead into the slow, ritualistic madness of 1/1s. Singular, obsessive. Each piece less a product, more an exorcism. Algorithmic ghosts woven with panic attacks, lucid dreams, and a kind of coded melancholy that doesn’t just haunt—it lingers.
But it’s not the volume that defines him, though the numbers are obscene. It’s the origin point. He doesn’t storyboard visuals like a Netflix pitch deck. He starts with a pulse: a whisper, a shadow in the gut, a conversation with something that might be memory or might be delusion. For VNDERWORLD, AI isn’t a tool, it’s an accomplice. Not a brush, a parasite. Not a canvas, a hall of mirrors. What it reflects is always warped, always louder, always crawling with something that feels like truth but hurts like hallucination. That’s why his work looks like hell. That’s why it feels like you’ve been there.
But VNDERWORLD isn’t interested in orbiting alone. His studio, WestCoastAILabs, is a kind of satellite broadcasting the gospel outward, with collabs, audio experiments, narrative threads twisting into something larger than self. It’s not just an artist anymore, it’s infrastructure. A mythology you can live inside. A digital city with its own weather.
And while the AI art world burns under the weight of lawsuits, bad PR, and billionaire platforms curating “community” into elitist echo chambers, VNDERWORLD doesn’t blink. He’s not naive. He’s read the rants. He’s seen the gatekeepers rebrand. But he also knows that for some of us, making is breathing. You don’t create for applause. You create because you’d rot without it. That’s the line in the sand that separates the authentic from the algorithm-chasers.
So step in. VNDERWORLD is about to get uncomfortably honest: the ethics, the ghosts, the glitchy spaces where art gets dangerous, and sacred.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW /. VNDERWORLD
You’ve said that art is something you need, that creating is essential to your being. What was the moment during the pandemic or after quitting your career when you created something and felt, “This is me again”? What part of that piece still lingers in your mind?
Right before quitting my career and pursuing art full-time, I bought a rug tufting gun and taught myself how to tuft. That first piece I tufted was based on a post-it-note doodle. That piece revived something in me that I lost through the years hyper-focused on my career. The piece is 7 Feet by 3.5 Feet and took up a large portion of my living room wall. I stare at that piece every day and consider if I didn’t get that tufting gun and start focusing on art as a hobby during covid, if I’d be doing what I’m doing today.
Your early influences include death metal, graffiti, skate culture, and counter-culture expression. How do those subcultural roots echo in your current AI work, via texture, tone, decay, form, composition?
Being a counter-culture connoisseur plays a major role in me choosing to create art with AI in general. The fact that I also sell the work as NFTs feels even more against the mainstream trends and embracing new things that are often misunderstood. In terms of the art I create, I often envision what the work would look like on a skateboard, or as a death metal album cover or as a giant graffiti mural. I prefer making edgier art because I embrace grittier culture and find normality to be superficial and boring. My art definitely reflects a rebellious nature I’ve never quite been able to shake.
You made 999 LVRKERS in July 2022, then shifted toward 1/1 collection work in 2023. What did you gain, and what did you lose, in moving away from PFPs and hype architectures toward singular, unique pieces?
I was approached by my good friend null_hax to create 1/1’s for a pfp collection he was working on called, Vnderworld Society. Those 999 LVRKERS were the start of this journey. That initial project launched right at the start of a pretty shitty bear market in 2022. But it was a pivotal moment for me to learn a lot about NFTs and about myself as an artist. We saw that the PFP space in 2021 and its decline in 2022 was very much hype-driven and we weren’t all that into the hype. The move to being a 1/1 artist seemed like the more natural progression. I still do love and appreciate a good PFP project and would love to make another PFP project in the future, but it is actually a lot of work. I gained an important realization focusing on 1/1 art though because I stopped focusing on hype-cycles and focused on my own creative voice vs. what I thought people wanted to see.
In your process, you describe starting with feelings or internal dialogue rather than strong visual intention, allowing the AI to “interpret” for you. What are some prompts or emotional states that have surprised you the most, when the AI really took over in a direction you didn’t expect?
When I first started prompting, I was really interested in capturing the dark side of AI and in turn, facing some inner-demons. I captured a lot of pain in my early work that remained bottled through life. I was going through a lot at that time and had quit years of therapy and replaced it with art. Art for me was very much about expressing myself. Now I had an opportunity to express feelings visually in real time in hundreds even thousands of iterations a day. I honestly did not expect my art or my taste to be as dark early on but I became obsessive with trying to capture something I wasn’t seeing others create with AI. I would often prompt for expressions of anger, depression, and hate. Capturing a sense of hopelessness; A bleak expression of disturbed desires and fleeting thoughts. Art became my visual diary. I can look at any of my work and tell you the month I created it and what I was feeling and going through emotionally at that time.
You mention you revisit older work via upscaling / inpainting. How do you decide which pieces to revisit? What changes in mindset do you have when you go back to earlier work — do you see them as flawed, as foundations, or as distinct parts of your journey?
Early on at the advent of AI image generators, I would prompt thousands of images per day. It takes a lot of time to truly process and appreciate the work. I still find myself going back to old work and random folders marked by date of creation and looking through and finding new work I completely had forgotten about creating. For me it’s a process of self-discovery. Each day I discover something new that I might appreciate from work that was originally overlooked. I will look through the same pieces over and over and over again until work started to stand out to me as outliers. I would see the potential in the piece in it’s lofi state and just need to see what it looks like with more details until it hits just right.
With WestCoastAILabs operating as an AI creative studio, how much of your work is personal vs commercial? Are you balancing collector-work, brand work, versus building the world of VNDERWORLD in your own voice?
I started West Coast AI Labs in order to start monetizing my work more outside of NFTs. The focus initially was on music videos and concert visuals. That vision has changed over the last year. I made 2 official music videos this year for musicians I like and those definitely had a personal artistic brand and creative voice. But the reality is, there is not much money in music videos. There can be in concert visuals but that’s an inconsistent later to try and climb. I’m in survival mode and this year has been about providing and making money from my AI skillsets. So the majority of the work that’s come out of West Coast AI Labs as been behind the scenes for Web3 and AI companies and showcases very little of my creative voice. When I’m not working on client projects, I find myself eagerly creating for-fun projects and making sure that balance is there.
The broader AI art space is under fire for ethical issues, training data, copyright, artists’ labor, prompt ownership. Where do you stand on those controversies, and what practices do you try to follow (or reject) in your work?
I can shamelessly say I love stealing art. Especially to trad artists that ask about the ethical dilemma posed by AI. An artist can pretend to have original ideas and styles, but everything is a remix of a remix of a remix. As a self-taught artist prior to AI, I would constantly find myself copying art I liked. Each time I would learn a new technique or perspective to creating. With AI, we just get to do this at a rapid pace. I do think blatantly copying a style or known IP is lazy and boring. I don’t train models on other people’s work nor would I want to ever just recreate what someone else has created. When I first started creating with AI, I would blend various artists from various time periods together and I eventually found a signature style. Then I trained a model on those outputs and use that model in all my work. I almost never find myself prompting for specific styles, I just blend models and explore this vast latent space of data within these models.
When you build narrative / world in your collections, especially as VNDERWORLD becomes “a place, not just a person”, do you imagine immersive experiences? Physical installations? Collaborations mixing sound, space, other media?
Yes I’m always moving the goal posts for what I want to achieve with Vnderworld and experiential media. From concert visuals and my music videos played at concerts in front of thousands of people, to building the beginning IPs for Vnderworld based stories. I never want to put myself in a box and I never want to stop creating with the next advancements in AI. I see myself wanting to slow down making constant content to feed an algorithm and wanting to make more long-form stories. When AI image and video first came out, I knew almost immediately that the advancements would progress far beyond images and videos. I’m very much interested in what is next. I’m eager to be able to make video games and explore interactive installations and interactive stories that are shaped in real time based on mood or communal decisions or current events.
You’ve used Stable Diffusion locally via Automatic1111, Deforum for animations, etc. What limitations have you run into with those tools (compute, output quality, originality, over-fitting)? What trade-offs are you okay with, when balancing chaos vs control?
Honestly, I feel very limitless in what I create. I sit at my computer all day running outputs for free using open source tools and without any censorship. Using these paid for video tools have felt extremely limiting to me this year. I find myself dealing all the time with censorship of my ideas via those tools. It’s why I took several months away from AI video to make the uncensored AI art I was craving. I do find that with Stable Diffusion and blending several models at a time, that there are a lot more artifacts. So when I do want to flesh out an idea in realism, I need to do more post-production in terms of edits or re-rolls or inpainting. I like the artifacts in my art, but sometimes I need to really rework a piece for it to come out the way I want. I’ve come to love the imperfections, embrace and even seak out those imperfections with my work though. It becomes harder to work with for client work where realism perfection is expected more.
What part of your creative voice do you feel the most insecure about, what critics or viewers frequently misunderstand about your work, or what you still feel you’re trying to master?
It’s actually really hard for me to share my art with friends or family. I think just in general, dark art has such a negative pre-conceived notion about it. I am so openly expressing myself as Vnderworld. Sometimes I become obsessive with creating dark imagery and I know it is an ugly side of myself that I am exposing. It’s a dark side that might be misunderstood. I often feel guilt or shame for liking certain art that is more taboo or seen as disturbing and pornographic or violent. It’s funny because my art is a lot more colorful and psychedelic outside of AI. It’s as if the AI brings out this other side I barely brushed the surface on and I get to explore it openly without shame or outside pressure or judgement from people I know. I’m still trying to master creating for me and not creating for others. Being Vnderworld has definitely allowed me to do that more. Removing self and ego from the act of creating is truly liberating and something I am constantly trying to practice when I create.
Provocative / Edge-Closing Questions
If VNDERWORLD had a sin (as in a transgression or taboo you want to commit in your work), what would it be? What boundary would you cross if nobody would judge?
I feel as if I cross a lot of those boundaries but often find myself holding back some of my darker work or feel shame in the pieces that depict extreme violence or gore.
There’s a critique circulating: that AI art is theft, or that artists are being used as marketing tools by platforms / speculators. What’s the harshest criticism you’ve heard, and do you secretly agree with any of it?
I love hate. Hate is such a fun and powerful emotion. And when I make art that can stir that emotion, I feel happy. I’ve received a lot of hate from the 2 official music videos I did for Peter Gabriel. When the work is more mainstream, the public scrutiny of the medium can be ruthless. As for artists being used, that will never end as long as there are artists in the world and ways to exploit them. I often agree with anti-ai folks who say AI art is cheap and lazy and talentless. But that can be said about any creative medium. There’s good AI and there’s generic AI slop. Just like there are amazing classical paintings and then there’s contemporary minimalism.
If you could burn every AI-model except one (one you get to keep), which would you sacrifice and why? What does that choice say about your values?
I almost exclusively only use Stable Diffusion models, specifically Flux Dev model. I could live the rest of my life without ever needing another model. There’s still so much latent space to explore within it. I don’t think the world needs these paywall tools like Midjourney that censor and over-saturate the AI creative space.
In a dystopian future with content saturated by generative “fast art”, what’s your strategy to make sure your voice is still felt, still distinct?
I pride myself in making complex art, rich with symbolism and meaning and chaos and details. I’ll always want to make art that pushes the norm and isn’t easily consumed. I can’t assure my creative voice will be felt, but you will always know it’s my creative voice when you see my work.
Minimalism or maximalist chaos — where does your work live on that spectrum, and where do you want people to feel it emotionally?
I don’t think I have a single minimalist piece of art. My art can only be explained as chaotic maximalism and absurdism. My work is reflective of a culture of over-indulgence. More is more. Chaos reigns supreme. Being normal is weird and being weird is normal. White space gives me anxiety. I need noise and at full volume.