Chris Maestas 0009.eth

Biography

0009, born Chris Maestas in 1984, is an American artist and designer based in Los Angeles whose practice merges the visual language of graffiti and 1990s street culture with generative artificial intelligence. Maestas began his creative journey as a graffiti writer immersed in LA's urban environment, and later studied at the Art Center College of Design before working as a senior automotive designer and illustrator. That dual background in street art and professional design training informs his layered, textured compositions, which often depict distorted figures, urban artifacts, and fragmented architectural forms rendered through a synthetic, AI-assisted process. Working under the moniker 0009 (also known as 0009.eth), Maestas treats generative AI not as a shortcut but as a collaborative tool for building a personal visual language shaped by memory, material, and place, deliberately letting go of some authorial control in the process. His major bodies of work, including 'Urbn Artfct,' 'Metaphysical Duality,' 'Synthetic Bloom,' and 'Worn Currents,' explore themes of decay, division, and reconstruction within the built environment, echoing the layered surfaces of city walls and the impermanence of street art. Maestas has held solo exhibitions internationally, including 'Wrong Side of the Fence' at ETERNO Gallery in Lisbon, and his work has been recognized alongside other early adopters of AI-driven art. He has collaborated with platforms and galleries such as Superchief Gallery NFT and Verse Works, and his editions have been released through NFT marketplaces spanning both Ethereum and Tezos. Across his practice, 0009 continues to investigate how graffiti's ephemeral, unauthorized presence in public space can be reimagined through the durable, generative logic of code and machine learning, creating a bridge between analog street culture and contemporary digital art.