Manic Distopia is an artist who reworks video game glitches, street art and 1990s graffiti into digital art built around a recurring skeleton figure. He grew up in Venice Beach, California, immersed in its skateboarding and graffiti scene of the late 1990s, before spending decades in sales and consulting.
He began minting generative NFT series in 2021, and one early collection, The Seven Deadly Sins, failed at launch after a gas-configuration problem in its smart contract. After a slow stretch several weeks into his NFT career, he reopened composition notebooks from his teenage years in Venice Beach and began drawing the skeleton character that became the centerpiece of Venice '99. The series drew nearly 172 ETH in volume within about six months of its debut. He has described the skeleton as what remains once surface material is stripped away, an image of structure rather than death.
