Vnderworld, the alias of Stephen Grzanowski, is a self-described “AI Alchemist and Stable Diffusion Purist” based in Portland, Oregon, who creates dark, symbol-laden imagery and animation using Stable Diffusion.He grew up near Santa Cruz, California, steeped in death metal, graffiti and skate culture, and turned to AI art in 2022 after a decade spent away from creative work.
He quit his career in 2022 and released his first collection, 999 LVRKERS, that July, the same week he discovered Midjourney before moving on to Stable Diffusion. Working locally through the Automatic1111 interface, he builds images with txt2img and then reworks them through img2img, inpainting and upscaling, and creates AI animation with the Deforum and Modelscope tools. He began focusing on one-of-one pieces in 2023 after an earlier period chasing the PFP hype cycle, and found his creative voice through months of open-call submissions and Deforum animation work.
In April 2023 he entered Peter Gabriel and Stability AI's #DiffuseTogether competition, creating the video for Panopticom with Stable Diffusion's Deforum tool through Automatic1111, and won second prize when results were announced that June. The video moves from sunflowers turned toward the sun, through imagery of surveillance cameras evoking the panopticon, into a post-war Berlin sequence and a psychedelic aquatic dreamscape. Gabriel called the result “extraordinary work”, telling Vnderworld “it seems like you were born to do it”.He later teamed up with collaborator null_hax, under the name West Coast AI Labs, to create a second Peter Gabriel video, Playing for Time, again using Deforum.He has said he wants to expand Vnderworld beyond himself into “a place, not a single person”, and has hosted open calls for other artists, including Destructive Derivatives, later won by the artist BlinD Imagery.,,
