5 Oct 2023/20 min/Ayla El-Moussa
MLow X Ayla El-Moussa
The surreal self portrait artist walks MLow through dynamic NFTs, alchemy, real gold, and the five year plan hidden inside an inverted triangle.
Recorded as an hour long Google Meet and published as a 20 minute cut, this conversation catches Ayla El-Moussa mid auction: her piece Lone Tree is counting down on SuperRare while she talks. She opens with a love letter to Transient Labs, whose tooling let her mint on her own contract and index to SuperRare in seconds instead of weeks, and walks through Natural Forms in Geometric Shapes, the dynamic one of one she built with Transient's Ben: it shifts from water by day to fire by night, when a Procreate sketch layer reveals what lies beneath the surface, and even the hover colors on its custom site are pulled from the artwork.
The middle of the conversation maps her world. She is always her own model, a choice that removes model releases, paperwork, and the old power dynamic of the male artist observing his muse; she shoots on a tripod with a self timer, 60 frames, one every three seconds. Her symbols run on alchemy: the inverted triangle as the sign for water, fire against it, Mars against the Moon, and a golden ratio that happened to fit her torso perfectly. She retells the origin story too: a Playboy collaboration onboarded her to SuperRare, a secondary bidding war over Bodyscape 2 introduced her to 6529, and she became, in her phrase, the First Lady of Memes, the first woman on the 6529 meme cards, with a piece inspired by Botticelli's Birth of Venus.
The final stretch looks forward. Opus One, the physical flagship of her Integration of Opposites direction, is 69 by 55 inches with real 24 karat gold and silver at the triangle tips, a 400 dollar pot of pigment for a few luminous square inches. She previews an unreleased annual edition in MLow's DMs, explains why she withholds prototypes until she can show the receipts, and lays out the five year goal: strip the body out of the work until an inverted triangle alone means Ayla is up to something. They close on tools, AI she uses only for branding, the generative art she respects more, and the Transient technology she cannot reveal yet.
What this episode teaches
- Be your own model, solve real problems
Ayla appears in every piece unless otherwise stated, which removes model releases, paperwork, and the question of who owns the image between photographer and muse. It also collapses logistics: if she wakes up creative, she can just step in front of the camera.
- Never hyperinflate your prices
Her strategy is methodical, deliberate minting: she has to go through the motions to quantify that she deserves a price before charging it, refusing to build fast on a hype market. The goal is that in five years the whole arc reads as intentional.
- Give the gimmick a lineage
Her first dynamic piece, Allegorical Figure of Day and Night, is titled after Michelangelo's Medici tomb sculptures, and at night it turns her body to marble. An art historical title converts a technical trick into a 500 year conversation.
- Withhold until you can show the receipts
Her biggest fear is a more established artist taking an idea and running with it, so she keeps prototypes private, aligns everything, releases, and then shows what she was doing a year earlier. MLow agrees: experiments change, so early reveals can trap you.
- Real materials do what pigment cannot
She tried fools gold and gold pigment; only real 24 karat gold and real silver produced the luminosity she wanted, glowing even through a photo of the physical piece. The pot cost about 400 dollars for three thin layers, and the expense is part of the point.
- Every tool is a brush
The camera changed her practice in high school because painting could not keep up with the scenes in her head; she treats AI, Photoshop, and Procreate the same way, tools deployed for a vision, never something that controls the style, because if the AI updates and your style changes with it, you never had one.
- Gate the physical to the token
For Nude Abstracts she offered holders a choice of a museum quality print or a lenticular print that shifts between abstract and nude, token gated to the collection. Physical perks reward holders without new supply.
- Plant symbols before you explain them
The inverted triangle already runs through her dynamic pieces, a Cyber Gallery pyramid custom whose marble tip is water, and the logo a 6529 designer built from her name. She refuses to decode it now, so that in five years people can listen back and finally get it.
The conversation, topic by topic
Transient Labs and the Lab
Ayla came through an intensive onboarding program of about 20 artists with invited speakers, which led her to Transient Labs' Lab tool. The old SuperRare pain, emailing for weeks to get work minted on your own contract indexed to your profile, now takes two seconds and a button. She calls herself a big believer in Transient; MLow has early access to the Lab too.
Natural Forms in Geometric Shapes
Her new dynamic one of one, coded with Ben of Transient Labs and minted through their Stacks site, link only. She watched him custom code her exact font and tracking, and pull hover colors from the artwork itself. The piece shifts from water by day to fire by night, when a pseudo skeletal Procreate sketch surfaces, showing what lies beneath, the fears and desires that come out after dark.
The golden ratio fit
She had played with the image for around five months, exploring math, triangles, and the golden ratio; when she overlaid it, the spiral hugged her body and the midline hit her torso exactly. That accident of fit convinced her the piece worked.
Always the model
All of her works are self portraits: no paperwork, no one beholden to her, full control. Technique is simple, a tripod and self timer, once a dangling plug in unit on a Sony Alpha R2, now a medium format camera with a built in timer, set for 60 shots at three second intervals.
Alchemy, water, and fire
Researching the inverted triangle she found it is the alchemical symbol for water, the element that anchors her whole practice; the upright triangle and fire answer it. She layers in the philosopher's stone, Mars ruled by fire as the male archetype, the Moon and tides as the female, and insists the work is about balance rather than being inherently a female piece.
Turning the muse on its head
MLow asks whether she would use male models. She has not yet, but she has been researching what muse even means: historically women observed by male artists and put into their work. Being both artist and muse reclaims that dynamic, and a male muse is a flip she had not even considered.
Playboy, 6529, and the meme card
Her first collaboration in the space was with Playboy, which onboarded her to SuperRare. When her Genesis piece Bodyscape 2 went into a secondary bidding war, the winner turned out to be 6529, who then bought her 0xSociety piece so the pair could hang together in his gallery. The team later made her the first woman on the 6529 meme cards, season one, with a piece inspired by Botticelli's Birth of Venus; she calls herself the First Lady of Memes. A Noble Gallery card followed, titled In Noble at collector Praveen's suggestion, about holding yourself to the highest elegance and decorum.
Nude art in an NFT market
MLow asks how nudes sit with the market. She points to 6529's OM metaverse, which is building a neighborhood for artists working with the body, and contrasts the unsolicited DMs many female photographers and models receive with her own experience: the work reads as timelessness and oneness with nature, not display. Collectors split between my wife would be upset and my wife told me to buy it. The cost is platform moderation: repeated shadow bans on Twitter and content removals on Instagram, the tricky line between fine artist and nude artist that she says Nude Yoga Girl also walks well.
The deliberate build
Roger Dickerman noticed it in an earlier interview and she confirms it: no hyperinflated prices, methodical minting, thought and mythology behind every release. The Century Series mimicked old cracked canvas because she was studying how old painted work withstands time; Nude Abstracts produced 69 abstracted self portraits, inspired by the Lost Robbies, Clyfford Still, and Mondrian, where clicking the abstract reveals the source photograph.
Opus One and real gold
The next era begins with Opus One, from the series Integration of Opposites: a physical piece 69 inches tall for the culture and 55 wide, figure into abstraction, black and white, inverted and upright triangles as yin and yang. At the triangle tips she used real 24 karat gold and real silver, sun and moon, from a tiny 400 dollar pot, layered three times, over watercolor, pencil, and Procreate painting. She tested platinum, the metal of the future, and plans to keep working with noble metals.
One edition a year
She mints a single edition annually as a promise to herself, and previews the unreleased candidate in MLow's DMs, an ocean version of the real and abstracted idea that only two people have seen. The plan: sell the edition and raffle the physical painting to a minter.
Easter eggs and the triangle
Asked about hidden symbols, she points to Allegorical Figure of Day and Night, designed to make her feel like a Michelangelo marble statue at night, the Cyber Gallery pyramid whose marble tip is water, and the triangle logo a 6529 designer drew from her name. The five year goal is recognition without the body: see an inverted triangle and know Ayla is up to something.
Influences and the brother collab
In web3 she names May, Reuben Wu for bridging photography and digital, a collage artist she admires, the duo Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti) for performance and generative body work, and Sam Spratt for quality, storytelling, and patience. Her brother Yakub, a photography and glitch artist, is the only person she has let photograph her: a burn and redeem collaboration shot in studio with Vaseline and Sellotape. From the canon: Rothko and Cy Twombly for color, Michelangelo for making marble feel like water, John Singer Sargent for paint technique, all feeding her Painted Muse series of photographs painted over to prove she can actually paint.
AI, generative art, and what Transient is hiding
She has used AI only for branding, Midjourney interiors to promote Nude Abstracts, though she is open to the coding side and watches her friend Rio make AI unique to his style. MLow praises Claire Silver for publishing her ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion workflows step by step, and argues Pindar Van Arman style artists who build their own models are closer to generative art than to Dall-E; he paraphrases Snowfro on generative customization, a hundred collectors each holding a slightly different one of one. Ayla would rather explore generative art than AI, sees it as the pathway bringing traditional collectors on chain, and teases an unrevealed Transient Labs technology combining blockchain and physicals, plus a hint: she loves how marble imitates the ocean.
In their words
“I am always in my pieces unless otherwise stated. All of my works are self-portraits, if you will.”
Ayla El-Moussa“Fire and water is what carved us.”
Ayla El-Moussa“I like to call myself the First Lady of Memes because I was the first female artist that they did.”
Ayla El-Moussa“I want people to see an inverted triangle and be like, Ayla's up to something.”
Ayla El-Moussa“AI, Photoshop, cameras, paint brushes, these are all just tools that we have in our bags.”
Ayla El-MoussaCite this conversation
Ayla El-Moussa in conversation with MLow, "MLow X Ayla El-Moussa," The MLow Show, 5 Oct 2023. https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2023-10-05-mlow-x-ayla-el-moussa.html. Quoted from a machine transcript.
Quotations come from machine transcripts. Check wording against the audio before republishing.