Darius Puia

In the digital art community he is BakaArts; elsewhere, Darius Puia. He works in Germany, more than seventeen years in. Imaginative worlds, he says — Akira, The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Moebius, Blade Runner. 3D modelling beside digital paint: cyberpunk grit, retro-futurist weather, vast buildings.

His evolution into a world-builder, he explains, happened naturally over time. At first he was focused on making strong images — composition, detail, lighting, atmosphere — until he realised that every image he made "felt like it belonged to the same bigger place." That place became Etherea, his unfolding conceptual universe: "It was not planned like a strict story from the beginning. It felt more like I was discovering pieces of the same world again and again." He still considers himself a visual artist, but world-building has become the deeper layer underneath: "I like the idea that an image can feel like a window into something much larger."

Scale, in his hands, is mostly emotional. "I usually try to create contrast between a tiny human presence and a massive structure or landscape. The small figure gives the viewer a way in." That recurring lone traveler, he says, "is partly the viewer, but also partly me" — a figure who feels small inside a huge world, but never powerless. "I do not usually want the character to explain the story. I want them to ask the question." And he deliberately leaves space for the imagination, letting parts of the world disappear into fog, darkness, distance, or light, "so the world feels like it continues beyond the image."

While his early career dwelled in neon-drenched cyberpunk shadows, his recent collections have brightened into decaying megastructures set against breathtaking celestial bodies — a shift he traces to a love of contrast: "I like mixing beauty with decay. Nature with machines." Beneath the sci-fi surface, his work is about "loneliness, curiosity, beauty, decay, and the feeling of standing in front of something bigger than yourself" — worlds that are, in his words, "beautiful, but not safe. Colorful, but not clean."

His studio rhythm moves between sound and silence: heavy metal, retrowave, synthpop, and even 90s rap while searching for ideas, then quiet for the technical hours of 3D building, lighting, and painting. "The best ideas usually need some quiet around them."

Puia first built his community on YouTube, where his Photoshop tutorials gathered some 150,000 subscribers and millions of views; his work has since appeared in art exhibitions, on digital billboards, and in magazines, earning features from the likes of Maxon and Blender Nation. Today he prioritises depth over the algorithm's pace — "the image has to come first" — and on the rise of generative AI, his credo is clear: "the soul of art comes from decisions. What you choose to show, what you leave out, what emotion you are chasing, what world you are building over time." In Etherea, every frame is such a decision.