For those discovering your work for the first time, who is Anthony Sylvester? How did you move from commercial filmmaking and music videos into your own artistic practice? I’m a small-town kid who’s been living in big cities since I was an older teenager. I found filmmaking at 14, shooting BMX videos in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and I’ve been at it ever since, working across just about every corner of film and digital media. I’m an experimenter, an Aquarian, a pessimistic optimist, and someone who needs adventure and freshness to feed both my life and my work. I still make commercial work, but most of my energy now goes into my own practice, and that shift really happened during COVID. On paper I was busy, doing a lot of music videos that looked creative and fun from the outside, but they were draining me. I’d spent years trying to find my way back to video art, which was my first love as a teenager in New York, making pieces inspired by David Lynch’s short films, Stan Brakhage, and the avant-garde filmmakers who showed me what the medium could be. Making a living had pushed all of that aside. So I started driving deep into the desert, really far out, shooting landscapes and roadside oddities on VHS and cutting little vignettes just for myself. People started paying attention, some of them went viral, and soon brands like Converse were asking me to make work in that exact style. That’s when it clicked for me: the more I leaned into my artistic side, the more people responded, because it was an honest look into who I am. Then I found AI, and everything opened up. Suddenly those desert tapes could hold whole narratives, new meaning, new intention, and that’s when I decided to go all in and make my art one of the biggest priorities in my life.