Max Capacity is a digital artist based in Santa Cruz, California,,working across analog VHS video glitch and pixel art, from hand-built cityscapes and NES hex glitches to DOS Punks, a collection of 1,000 pixel art PFPs.Since 2005, when he began with the collective Analog Medium, he has found beauty in decay, entropy and disintegration through color, movement and humor.
Working under the name Max Capacity since 2008, he built a following on Tumblr and Twitter for glitch art made with NES, Atari, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum games and hardware, work later covered by VICE, The Verge, WIRED UK and Boing Boing.,In a 2011 interview he described how, working with already half-broken electronics, he moved from capturing accidental glitches to deliberately provoking them, finding in glitch art a nihilism and entropy he considered beautiful.In a 2011 Digicult interview, the curator Matteo Bittanti listed him among a handful of artists then working in game art.Max Capacity is cited in two of the field's early theoretical texts: Rosa Menkman's The Glitch Moment(um) (2011), which categorizes him as a “signal processing artist” alongside LoVid, and a 2013 peer-reviewed article in Revista Cultura Visual, which reproduces his work X1689-0000 alongside a descriptive paragraph.,
His work has been shown on six continents, including in “PARALLAX ViξW” at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, the International Teletext Art Festival at Ars Electronica in Linz that same year, and “First Thursdays” at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, curated by Lorna Mills.In October 2021 he released DOS Punks, a collection of 1,000 pixel art NFTs on Tezos inspired by early computer graphics and DOS-era aesthetics, overseen by the community-run DOS Punks DAO.In a 2022 Right Click Save interview, the artist ROBNESS named him, alongside other artists, as one of those who helped drive the Trash Art movement on Tezos.He has curated the touring exhibition series “Protocol Decay”, which held editions in Tokyo, Craiova and New York in 2025 before closing that year in Marfa, Texas.,
In 2023 Fakewhale included his GIF-based glitch work in a survey of the medium.His work transforms decaying analog media, such as vinyl, cassette tapes and 8-bit games, into new digital forms that treat wear and disintegration as a testament to the passage of time rather than as flaws.
