Interview with Animator & Street Artist Diego Bergia | MakersPlace Blog

Ahead of being featured in the MakersPlace-curated digital art exhibit at the Cleveland MOCA, MakersPlace sat down with graffiti artist turned animation director, Diego Bergia to learn more about his practice and the intersection of street art, videogames, animation, and web3.

Can you tell me about the piece FREEWAY DEGENZ? Are the characters in the piece real graffiti artists? Is it based on an actual piece, like your LA River Saber homage?

Yeah, well, it’s based on what was called in the 90s the Freeway Heavens. It might still be going on. Around that time in L.A., the highway signs were being bombed pretty often. GK and Chaka were doing it a lot, and the MSK crew. A lot of writers were getting up on these freeway signs, which is still just crazy to me. Imagine fucking cars whizzing by underneath you at 90 miles per hour or whatever. That’s some ballsy shit I could never do. So it’s not based on a specific piece, just a time and place.

Where did the name Lepos come from? I did some research and learned that, in Latin, lepos denotes pleasantness, charm, and grace. Greek also has its own lepos, which means husk.

That’s funny because I found those after the fact. Well, the Latin one for charm made me stick with it. Originally it was just from getting high one time and watching a horror movie called Night of the Lepus. It’s just a bunch of like these crazy, giant rabbits. I was pretty young, and I just thought it was the fucking weirdest word. 

Anyone in the NFT space is familiar with the ubiquity of video game plans in just about every pfp roadmap. You’ve been working on a video game concept around Lepos and your friends in the graffiti world (Revok, Ces, Bates, and Giant) for over a decade. Has the “roadmap” approach piqued your interest?

I would love to make a video game and anyone that looks at my stuff can clearly tell that it’s videogame ready. I have a library of all the sprites and artwork that I’ve made. It’s program-ready to become a game. But roadmaps are a serious thing, and I wouldn’t put one out unless I knew I could deliver. 

I don’t make NFTs as a full-time job. I wish I could live off of them, but I don’t right now. But if I could pay the bills and set aside money for a programmer, then that’s what I’d do. Before NFTs, promotion was a big consideration, but that seems to have changed a bit with web3 because you don’t necessarily need a company to do that for you. 

The obstacle over the past 10 years has been that videogame studios are all about their own IP. You can’t pitch a game to a studio like you can pitch a TV show to a TV studio. It’s not the same. So that’s why I never really got anywhere then. 

But back to the question. The roadmap thing I just would take it too seriously. Roadmaps are essential for certain projects. But a lot of people are just doing roadmaps to get people to buy their shit. And I…