Yosca Maeda is a Japanese pixel artist who works under the name mae, building intricate, hand-placed pixel-art scenes that range from nostalgic, emotional landscapes to pop and cute characters. He describes pixels as “atoms of digital light”, connecting them one at a time to trace inner feelings and fragments of memory rather than to render a finished picture.
Maeda has previously worked as an elementary school teacher, an experience he has said left him with a lasting commitment to being an ally to children and to those without a place to belong. His Drools & Pixels project applies a related sensibility to a collection of 32x32 pixel-art characters called Drools, whose parts are compressed with run-length encoding and stored fully on the Ethereum blockchain in the manner pioneered by Nouns DAO. In 2024 Maeda held the solo exhibition “Afterglows” at NEORT++ in Tokyo, pairing LED displays with interactive screen-based works that let visitors turn a physical dial to lower the resolution of his looping animations. He has said the turning motion was inspired by music boxes and wind-up toys, giving viewers a physical way to rewind his work toward an 8-bit register of memory. Works shown in the exhibition included Afterglow, Light in Passing, Rainy Day Ghost and Plankton_Always, all made in 2024.
