Q: Hello Justin, to get things started, state your name and briefly describe what you do and have established.

My name is Justin Maller. By day, I'm a graphic artist from Melbourne Australia. In this capacity, I make pretty, shiny pictures for people. By night, I am the Creative Director for depthcore.com, a creative collective I founded in 2002. In this capacity, I make pretty, shiny pictures for myself, and recruit like minded people to keep me company.

Q: Your profile states you are inspired by music and it's also a hobby. Are these the only avenues music plays in your life and how far does it go? Top 3 musicians of all time?

Music is very important to me, and always has been. I'm not a fan of a quiet workplace; there's always music playing at home or in my studio, whether I'm playing it or just listening to it. I've played drums for many years; it's not so easy now that I live in an apartment, but I still manage to hit the skins from time to time. I took up guitar a few years ago, but never really got good at it. I can still belt out Hotel California or Wonderwall when we get drunk, but there's very few people in the world who would voluntarily listen to me play... In terms of favorite artists, that's a tough question. Three in my thoughts at the moment; Morphine, Daft Punk and Faithless.

Q: I am a personal fan of design communities, Depthcore seems to be a very close nit environment and styles seem to correlate all the way to the music. Was this your initial vision when it was first created? What is in the future of Depthcore?

I don't really think I had an initial vision when I created depthCORE that stretched beyond 'a place for abstract artists to gather and release art together'. I suppose the good thing about that simple modus operandi is that it has persisted up until today in the form of a diverse, but strong aesthetic that is unified despite containing huge stylistic disparity across multiple mediums.

In terms of the future for dC, that's a question that merits it's own essay. In a nutshell, look for a much sharper division between collective and community in the future, and a great deal of development and change, especially in regards to the community.

Q: Who are some key artists from Depthcore, or artist that just stick out in your memory?

One of the coolest things about running dC is that I get to work with a few of my favorite artists in the world. Nik Ainley from shinybinary.com blew my mind when I first stumbled across his work a few years back; he accepted my invite to join dC, and proceeded to make some of the sickest, most defining pieces to ever grace our pages. In my opinion, few artists produce the way Nik does, where every single detail of every piece is perfect. Perfect is an abused word that has lost the weight it should have; know that when I use it here, I mean it; Nik's pixels are perfect. Jerico Santander is another guy like this - his work is sublime in a way that few to non can replicate. I'm a sucker for technical perfection, and these guys not only achieve that, they utilize it to represent subtle and unusual concepts - it's what dC art is all about in my eyes.

Q: What was the inspiration for this visual idiom, did you get behind your computer and decide to scale 2d/3d images together? Who or what was a catalyst for this style?

I just got sick of people seeing my abstract work and saying 'Ooo, it looks like an alien!' I decided that the best way to avoid this would be to present the work in a more natural context, so that people don't get lost in the fact that what they are looking at is artificial. After a while, I decided that I wanted my work to represent a heightened reality, not just a baseless construction, so using photographs was a natural progression for me to take.

Q: What is the future of Justin Maller and Superlover?

A lot of learning. I've spent so long focusing on mastering Photoshop (a mission still in progress) that I've never really turned my attention to other programs like Illustrator, Flash and After Effects, or even 3D modeling, so this year is going to be a period of personal development for me whilst I come to terms with these programs and their associated mediums. Expect some motion, expect some web, and expect a lot more artwork - gotta work the kinks out somehow...

INTERVIEW BY: SON / SOMETHINOFNOTHIN