Matt Semke, who works under the online moniker catswilleatyou, is a multidisciplinary artist from Minnesota working across traditional techniques, digital media, VR, and augmented reality. Since 2006 he has posted a new piece of art to his website, catswilleatyou.com, every day, building a streak that had reached more than 6,255 consecutive days by the time of a 2023 interview.
He treats the streak as a discipline that keeps his skills improving. Searching online for other artists doing similar daily challenges, he came across Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), who was not yet well known but had built a community of artists around the same daily practice, and found Beeple's subsequent rise to prominence motivating to his own streak. He works almost daily in VR painting software, collaborating directly with the developers of these tools, and shares process videos of his work filmed from inside the headset. He has also built his own metaverse spaces where his VR paintings can be viewed and experienced interactively, and uses augmented reality to bring individual frames of his work to life for viewers.
He sells his work as NFTs,at times pairing them with signed physical prints carrying an augmented reality feature, such as your mind has always been decentralized (2021).Since the mid-2000s his work has been shown across Minneapolis galleries and art fairs, and since 2004 he has staged recurring collaborative live art battles with a fellow artist under the name Billy vs Matt. His short films have screened at festivals including “Cannes Shorts” and the “Monstra Animation Festival” in Lisbon in 2023.
