Under the moniker Balfua, Berlin-based artist and musician Sam Balfus crafts immersive digital artworks rooted in world-building, fantasy, and the blurred lines between reality and imagination. Music and visuals converge in intricate, multisensory environments where he integrates various analogue and digital techniques—drawing, sculpture, Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI), animation, VR, 3D printing, and AI. Nxt Museum called Balfua to talk about his creative process, his motivations, and his work on show at Nxt, ‘The Slollaleia’.

NXT: What is ‘The Slollaleia’? 

BALFUA: ‘The Slollaleia’ is a large screen-based installation combining 3D, world-building, and a bit of AI. It is a piece of lore from the ‘Sayssiworld’, which is my world-building project. The artwork shows a machine with a screen, into which the artwork’s characters put tokens to display a ‘Slolla’: these Slollas are different creatures that inhabit the Sayssiworld. I think about and create Slollas in different ways. Some of them are abstract shapes and some are anthropomorphic.

What are the most important tools that you use for creating your art? 

BALFUA: I don’t have a set of the most important tools. I like to work with 3D a lot. I use Blender for 3D, Unity and Unreal for video game software and anything interactive, as well as Photoshop, drawing, painting, and traditional drafting skills. I’m generally trying to get my hands on as many tools as possible. It’s not so much about the tool for me as the output.

Sometimes I make stuff with AI knowing that I’m just going to use it as testing. I’ll use AI if I’m modelling a creature and I’m interested in exploring some skin textures for it. I use it to ideate and create a bunch of different weird skin textures, just for inspiration. Then I’ll take them into VR and use those inspirations to model. 

Sometimes I’m just using AI video, like for some of the characters in ‘the Slollaleia’. I was really excited to try to make generative video that was trained off my own renders so that it would look like my 3D. AI lets me create a lot of bioluminescent textures, or super detailed forests that would just crash my computer if I had all those 3D plants in my Blender scene. With AI I get this realism and beauty out of it that I wouldn’t be able to get on my own.

There are a lot of emerging narratives that talk about the idea that AI takes agency away from the artist. What would you say your role is as an artist when working with AI, and what’s the role of AI in your work?

BALFUA: I would argue that it takes more agency away from you than something like Photoshop, but it gives back just as much. The reason I use it is because I can make stuff with AI that I could never make rendering. There are all these textures and so much stuff that I would have to be way more skilled to do. My favourite AI artists can make work using AI that really looks like their work and feels like their work. Even if it doesn’t, it has some soul and something cool in it that breaks it outside of this territory, which feels like the aesthetic of where the AI model got all of its data.

For example, Midjourney pulls from giant resources like DeviantArt, which is open source. It’s where Midjourney has pulled most of its stuff from, so you can see just this DeviantArt feeling this style in Midjourney now. For people to get around that and make something really interesting is a fun, exciting challenge on its own.

In terms of ethics, I believe if you’re just stealing somebody’s style, that’s obviously a bite, but I don’t see general interaction with Midjourney in that way – or with any other AI software that can show you images that you want to see. There’s definitely a range of ways  to use it, like there is with everything else in the world. Many gross ways, and many cool ways, and many ways that are not so black and white.

Do you have a specific idea of what you want to create before you start, or do you give the tools you’re working with a lot of creative agency? 

BALFUA: Not really. I approach it the same way I approach drawing, which was my first medium. I don’t necessarily have an idea, I just put the pen down and start. That’s why a lot of my drawings look abstract but eventually take shape. Sometimes I’ll have an idea and then try to put it down faithfully, but that’s much more rare than just starting and seeing what comes out. I do the same thing for music and pretty much everything else, even 3D.

How do you make sure to still keep your style?

BALFUA: I can’t help but have it look a particular way. The things I like to see are not explicit, but they are specific. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know what I like. That sensibility builds up over time, and a lot of exploration and seeing what works and what doesn’t work is what created the lore. Many characters and silly places that these characters are from are based on sketches or experiments that made my friends laugh or that I thought looked cool and that I used in multiple ways over time.

Why did you create the Sayssiworld? 

BALFUA: I was always really inspired by world-building like Tolkien, and I was a super big nerd for fantasy. It was inspiring to me, and I really wanted my own – something that I could imagine forever and get deeper and deeper into. I liked the idea of building my own language and making the grammar; I’m not nearly as researched as Tolkien in that way, but it’s still fun for me to do.

I’ve always been creating the Sayssiworld. You can clearly see a link from the drawings that I was making when I was like six or seven. I could place those characters that I used to draw into the Sayssiworld, and it wouldn’t feel dissonant. When I was in college, I started doing some drawings, and I remember writing the word ‘Slolla’, just doing it stylishly because I liked the letters and that kind of stuck. I started calling the abstract shapes ‘Slollas’ and then ‘Sayssi’ came the same way. 

I used to do graffiti. ‘Slolla’, ‘Sayssi’, are made-up names that have to do both with my interest in language and with the history of graffiti: picking tag names and seeing what looks good, what sounds good, and what works. I had tagged the word ‘Sayssi’ in high school a few times so it existed already, and then there were ‘Slollas’, and ‘babas’, and ‘jinxes’, and all these different ones. Eventually, I decided that these would all be characters and that they would live in Sayssiworld.

I’m interested in the ways that languages come in different flavours, like German compared to Spanish, they have different flavours, just like ice cream. This is very exciting to me. I don’t think of the Sayssiworld and the Sayssi language as pure in an innocent way, I think of it as pure in a raw way. The Sayssiworld is just as fucked up and beautiful as our world, and anything that I would want to express in the Sayssi language, I would want to do in a way that’s based on the personality of whoever’s talking.

What do you want the visitors to feel when they see ‘the Solalleia’ at Nxt Stage? 

BALFUA: I don’t have a specific way I want anybody to feel, but I’m definitely trying to hit everybody with a maximalist blast of a lot of my favourite things. I really have it open for interpretation. I’m doing a lot of work to hide the lore from you: you know it’s there, and you know that I’m making up words, and I hope you can imagine that I have a context for all of the silliness, but I don’t need it to be explicit. I like it when it’s clear that there’s a lot under the surface, and you only get to taste the candy coating.

What’s one thing that you like to do outside of your studio to get inspiration from? 

BALFUA: Most of my inspiration comes from my friends and just generally having fun with them and in the world. I love to cook with them. With my band in particular – this is four people, plus some extended family outside of it – that I’ve been working with since high school and college. So the creative relationship is very deep and it’s a lot of inside jokes and silliness that turns into characters and world-building. It’s about creating the sort of language with your friends that everyone does and then putting that into the soul of the work. We all have practices that are in line with one another, which feed off of each other. We have practices that, if you put them next to each other, you could see links, but they’ve got their own strength that I’m always trying to tap into.