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Parker Ito and Evil Biscuit on Possessed Spirits

Multidisciplinary artists Parker Ito and Evil Biscuit come together for their first collaborative NFT project, Heavy Liquid Graphic, a Halloween-themed collection merging horror aesthetics, digital collage and playful fear. In conversation with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony), they discuss how their distinct styles, vintage photos and GAN-warped overlays coalesce into a darkly humorous take on nostalgia and the supernatural.
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Peter Bauman: Can you talk about how you two decided to work together? What does collaborating allow for that might not be possible individually?‍

‍Parker Ito: Biscuit reached out to me; I can’t remember when it was, maybe just after my Verse project. Drifella 2 was one of the first NFT projects I saw that really spoke to me, so I was super honored he wanted to collaborate. This is my first collaborative NFT project but I’d done collaborative exhibitions before, mainly with the duo Body by Body (not active anymore). Our collaborative group was called “Aventa Garden,” which is a play on avant garde.
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It seems really obvious that NFTs are the perfect medium for collaboration. 

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‍I have some other collaborative projects I’m working on right now as well. ID Xanthrax and myself are doing something that will come out early December with Shape.

‍Evil Biscuit: I think I reached out wanting to collaborate initially, whether it be a painting show or a collection. I just love combined efforts for a vision of something and the happy accidents that come out of that way of working.

‍‍Peter Bauman: What was the process of working together like on Heavy Liquid Graphic? Did anything stand out as particularly challenging or surprisingly smooth?

‍Parker Ito: The project I did with Verse was so clean and constrained and dealt with this space that was fixed in one-point perspective so my headspace was really that.
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Biscuit had this idea to make a collection based around these Drifella and Drilady images and run them through this GAN that would turn them into these jagged outlines. 

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‍So it was almost like the overlays were the starting point, versus the other way around. I think this is noteworthy because, in a way, Gay NFT is so tied to the use of overlays; this is what makes it formally distinct from a lot of other NFTs.

‍‍Biscuit started making stuff and would send me tests of what he was doing. He had his own internal logic guiding him. Biscuit is a savant type; the creativity just comes out of him. But for me, coming from a previous project that was really structured, it was a bit impenetrable to me. I sent him this song from the “Shred Earthship” album, which is a collaboration by Mick Barr and Zach Hill. To me what we ended up making feels like the visual equivalent to this album.

‍Evil Biscuit: I think file organization and trying to keep things from being chaotic is impossible for me so sending things back and forth and especially using hashlips to keep the JSONs clean was difficult.‍

‍Peter Bauman: What about the outputs themselves? Did you two curate them or is it a completely blind mint? If curated, what was that process?

‍Parker Ito: The total collection is 999. We each outputted and curated one half, independent of the other.

‍Evil Biscuit: Curated. The process is much more involved but overall makes me happier with the outputs. It’s like generating multiple builds of the collections and then grabbing ones I like with the JSON and piecing it together through several gens and restructured configurations.
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‍Peter Bauman: What commentary are you making about fear and art? Can you talk about choosing quotes like “I’m scared to go to an art museum”?

‍Parker Ito: That was just an image I saved from Twitter that I thought would be a good trait one day.

‍Peter Bauman: And what inspired the dark, horror aesthetic and connection to Halloween? It’s interesting because at the same time it seems like an opportunity to have some fun; it’s playful horror.‍

‍Parker Ito: I think it mainly came out of trying to find a formal solution for these overlays and the black background. “Auratic” images collaged underneath, sort of bursting through them, just looked best. Biscuit had mentioned he wanted to release on Halloween and I was down but then got distracted with other shit.‍

‍Then he hit me up a week before Halloween and was like “Get me stuff so we can release it on Halloween.” I’m in the Dominican Republic right now and I have this super shitty laptop and not great internet connection. It’s been pouring rain here because of the Melissa storm. It actually worked out great because I’m stuck inside all day. But the bulk of the collection on my end came together very fast.

‍Evil Biscuit: Yeah, I think the dark vibe comes from this time of year. My wife is really into Halloween and I like collections that drop on holidays or special events. I had these Etch A Sketch pixel line drawings on black backgrounds and it just seemed like a good day to work with them. We talked about making dribaby or an alien/ufo collection but this seemed like something we both could put fuel towards.

‍Peter Bauman: How did you curate all the smaller images that make up the collage, especially incorporating your previous projects like Drifella and Drilady?
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Evil Biscuit: My old method for Drif and Drif 2 was to use my different feeds on Twitter, IG and Pinterest to gather images/memes. And for Drif 3, I did more digging into paintings and textural stuff or making my own. 

‍For this one I was looking for assets a lot on eBay: vintage photographs and textures, weird vintage polaroids or Halloween ones. There are whole seller accounts dedicated to cataloguing/selling them.
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Ran into some crazy old nudes and other strange circus stuff. 

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‍I also found some postmortem children's photos, where back then they would dress their deceased child in proper clothes and dedicate nice tintype or ambrotype photographs of them. One made it in the collection. It's a very haunting but beautiful thing.

‍Spooky story: I was also buying and collecting these mid-1800s antique photocases. And in the middle of the night in my one-year-old son's room my wife and I randomly woke up and heard one of his toys playing music that was turned off.
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We were puzzled; then shockingly my wife suggested maybe one of these photo cases was possessed by a spirit or ghost or some energy of the person.

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‍I immediately got chills down my spine and was like, “Yeh, lol, that’s definitely possible.” The next day I did a little research on specific methods to release any entity from an object.‍

‍I basically just ended up lighting incense and cleansing them with smoke while saying a couple different prayers/banishment. No haunts or random electronic toys going off since 🤞
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Peter Bauman: Oh spooky! And what else might have inspired the work, any particular artists? It seems to draw from video games and cards, as well.

Parker Ito: I don’t really think in terms of “inspiration;" I’m more collecting stuff always.
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I just love images. 

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‍Biscuit made a lot of assets and I just riffed on the vibe of those by going on Pinterest and downloading a bunch of stuff. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is one of my favorite movies, though.

‍Evil Biscuit: There are a few artists like Phil Hale and Justin Mortimer that do these collages but they will find and scan from old books or take photos themselves.
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I always thought with this NFT stuff it would be sick to generate compositions or paintings in a similar way. 

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‍So with these I definitely tapped into a version of myself that was working on these digital collages from 2020ish and looking at this same work just with new updated methods to create. And a ton of inspiration from Parker especially as well.
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Hilariously I just found this painting (below) from 2013, where Parker had already done the pixel line with a Mario on a painting 🤦
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‍It's crazy cause I'm not a very good student with art and a few years ago I saw Parker’s work for the first time and I got to go back and dig through. It's so sick to see someone who was already making this type of work way before I even started making art seriously. Thinking about it, it's really such a pleasure and honor to collaborate.‍
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‍There was also Petra Cortright's 999flower (2022) collection a long time ago when I got into NFTs too that I think about a lot in making more of these larger digital painting-style works. Milady Aura especially had an influence on the vibe, too.
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‍Peter Bauman: You’ve both mentioned the extensive and noticeable use of digital outlining from previous projects. Can you talk about this choice a bit more? It seems to give the collection a digital-animation nostalgia.

‍Parker Ito: Biscuit is the one that can speak to this best.

‍Evil Biscuit: Yeah, I think they bring in characters from our other projects in a unique way without being very upfront. They layer against each other and create a cool tapestry of pixels. But I think it’s a way to slowly dip out of having a main guy, so to say, and to let the photos layer and tell a story. 

‍Peter Bauman: Can you talk more about the story? The project seems to reframe fear through humor and child-like allusions. It’s an honest opportunity to look at our fears today in a detached way, without the overt scariness.‍

‍Parker Ito: The dating site OkCupid did all these studies on their users. Supposedly, commonality on how the question “Do you like horror movies?” was answered led to the most successful dates.

‍Peter Bauman: What’s the relationship between nostalgia, fear and your art making?

‍Parker Ito: Fear and nostalgia are not things I think about in relation to the actual act of artmaking.

‍Evil Biscuit: Yeah, when I was a kid, my older brother would always have horror movies on. And they really frightened me to the point where for a while as an older teen/adult I wouldn't watch movies like that, particularly Saw and The Ring. Even now, I just went and saw Shelby Oaks, which was pretty mid. (Sorry for spoilers) but it had a lot of demonic stuff and satanic or pagan sort of rituals to a demon, and baby sacrifice!

‍That shit just disturbs me and somehow manages to manifest some sort of fear and bad energy that follows me home. But there definitely is some relation between those two things for me; now it makes me relate to my child self.
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‍Peter Bauman: And speaking of how the project relates to yourselves, Biscuit, you said in a Tweet about the project, possibly joking, “i hope one day i’m able to convey myself clearly through the image.” To what extent do these projects serve as self portraits for you both?‍

‍Parker Ito: I like to wear mainly black clothes but then have little hints of color; for example, a black suit with a colorful print shirt and colorful socks. People should look at the asset names and try and guess who made what.

‍Evil Biscuit: I'm interested in innovating and inspiring others to make things from different vantage points and I was thinking about how things can be taken and perceived way further than you anticipate. I guess right after Drif 3, I'm working on how I can show different angles of similar subject matter or aesthetic with a new base motif of sorts.

‍This collage style has gotten somewhat stale for me and it was a nice challenge for us to give it a little spark. I'm looking forward to everyone seeing the whole collection and hope that they are fresh and can give you some memories of minting on this Halloween.



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Parker Ito is a multidisciplinary artist, associated with the later net art, Post Internet and now the Solana avant scenes. His practice, which spans painting, sculpture, video, installation, drawing, websites, NFTs and books, is as much about the lines that exist between disparate media and forms, as it is about discrete pieces.

‍‍Evil Biscuit is a pseudonymous artist know for the Drifella series.
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Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's editor in chief.