How Alessio De Vecchi Built the Visual Identity
Every origin story worth telling starts with an obsession. Matteo Milleri had one. He had been circling the edges of something — a project that would dissolve the wall between electronic music and visual art, something that didn't just accompany sound but inhabited it. He had the music. He had the label. What he did not have was the person who could build the world he was hearing in his head.
According to Variety, Milleri "pestered [De Vecchi] on Instagram for a meeting." Not a casual DM. Not a passing interest. Persistence — the kind that precedes the things that matter. Milleri had scrolled through De Vecchi's work and recognized something that went beyond aesthetic compatibility. He saw a visual language that could carry narrative weight, that could turn a DJ set into mythology.
He found Alessio De Vecchi.
What followed was not an assignment. It was a creative partnership — two people with complementary obsessions sitting across from each other for months, developing concepts together, arguing about aesthetics, building a shared vision from scratch. Milleri brought the musical architecture, the industry relationships, and the strategic ambition. De Vecchi brought a fully formed visual language, years of prior character work, and a professional network of world-class 3D artists he had cultivated over fifteen years. The ideas were developed together. The translation of those ideas into a visual world — the characters, the design system, the production pipeline — was De Vecchi's work.
"Matteo met Alessio on vacation in Ibiza, and the two quickly found synergies. Alessio's gift for creating surreal and captivating worlds inhabited by fantastical characters fascinated Matteo."
— Real Music & Money
They met on the island where electronic music goes to worship itself. Ibiza. But there was nothing casual about what happened next. Two people sat down and discovered that they had been building toward the same thing from opposite directions — one through sound, the other through light and form. De Vecchi was already an established digital artist with a fiercely distinctive aesthetic: sculptural, cinematic, rooted in the uncanny valley between human and machine, between tenderness and terror. His work had been shown on SuperRare and featured by Vice, Coeval Magazine, and We Are — each publication drawn to the same disquieting beauty. What Milleri saw across that table was not just a collaborator. He saw the visual architect a project like ANYMA demanded — someone who didn't decorate music but co-authored the experience.
EVA did not begin in 2021. She did not begin with ANYMA. The character — a robot, a humanoid, a figure suspended between the mechanical and the divine — emerged from years of De Vecchi's independent work in CGI character design, dating back to 2018 and 2019. Working files from that period show sphere concepts, robotic humanoid figures, and the visual language that would later define the project. By 2020, De Vecchi was minting 3D robot and cyborg artworks on SuperRare — the same aesthetic DNA, the same sculptural intensity, the same uncanny tension between human warmth and machine precision. This was not speculative. It was a body of work with a market, a following, and an artistic identity that existed before Matteo Milleri ever sent a DM.
Lilith, too, traces her origins to this period — a character concept that De Vecchi had been developing in his personal practice since 2019, long before she entered the ANYMA narrative.
In 2021, the partnership crystallized into something real. De Vecchi did not start from scratch. He brought EVA — a character he had already been building for years — into a new context. From her first ANYMA iteration — a sculptural head minted as EVA 0 on SuperRare — she carried the weight of everything the project would become. She was the thesis statement: this is not about a DJ behind decks. This is a world, and it has inhabitants.
"De Vecchi, who first met Milleri after he pestered him on Instagram for a meeting, has been involved since Anyma's inception, beginning with the robot Eva head that would inevitably grow to include a body."
— Variety, January 2025
"In 2021, De Vecchi teamed up with Matteo Milleri, one half of the famed techno duo Tale Of Us, to co-found Anyma."
— Groove Atelier
The distinction matters. ANYMA was not a music project that hired a visual artist. De Vecchi co-authored the project from day one — bringing years of prior creative work into a partnership where the music and the visuals shaped each other simultaneously. The visual language was not created on commission. It was an existing artistic practice that converged with Milleri's musical vision.
EVA 0 debuted as an NFT on SuperRare, then crossed the threshold from screen to stage on November 28, 2021, at Printworks London. That night was the first time an audience stood inside what ANYMA would become — not a concert with projections, but a real-time visual narrative fused to sound, driven by a character who stared back at the crowd with an expression that was neither warm nor cold but something unmistakably alive. The future of electronic music performance was declared in a converted industrial printworks in South London, and most of the industry did not yet understand what they were looking at.
One character is a concept. Multiple characters are a mythology. ADAM arrived as EVA's counterpart, her mirror, her complication. LILITH — a character De Vecchi had been developing since 2019 — entered the ANYMA world carrying the archetype's full weight: defiance, autonomy, the refusal to be secondary. Then SYREN, fluid and dangerous, pulling narrative gravity in yet another direction. Each character was designed not as a visual accessory but as a node in a story that audiences would piece together across shows, drops, and seasons.
De Vecchi was not just drawing characters. He was building a design system — a comprehensive visual language with rules, constraints, and internal logic. Color palettes. Lighting philosophies. Surface textures that communicated emotion before a single note played. A style guide that could scale from a phone screen to a warehouse wall and eventually, though no one quite knew it yet, to the largest LED surface ever constructed. This was infrastructure, not illustration.
This work happened in constant dialogue with Milleri, whose musical direction shaped the emotional register of each character. But the design system itself — the rules, the constraints, the internal logic that allowed the visual language to scale — was De Vecchi's construction.
The Genesys show at Printworks London in 2022 was the proof of concept that changed the trajectory. It was the first full production built on De Vecchi's visual framework — a complete narrative arc unfolding in real time across an entire show. The audience was no longer watching a performance. They were inside a story. Genesys established the template that would scale from clubs to arenas to festival main stages, each venue larger, each execution more precise, the visual system absorbing every new constraint and emerging intact. It was the night the blueprint was stress-tested under heat, sweat, and sixteen thousand bodies, and it held.
By 2023, the impact of De Vecchi's visual direction had become impossible to ignore, even for an industry that habitually credits the person behind the microphone and forgets everyone else. EDM.com named him Best Visual Artist of 2023 — not best visuals for a specific show, but best visual artist, full stop. In an ecosystem of hundreds of touring acts with visual packages, De Vecchi stood alone. The recognition was an acknowledgment that ANYMA's visuals had no equivalent in electronic music, and that the person responsible for them had established an entirely new standard for what a live show could look like.
In September 2024, De Vecchi served as Art Director for ANYMA's collaboration with The Weeknd in Sao Paulo. Consider the gravity of that sentence. The Weeknd — one of the most commercially dominant artists on the planet, a performer whose stadium tours are themselves exercises in visual ambition — chose to step into ANYMA's world. Not the other way around. The visual system De Vecchi had built was so distinct, so fully realized, that one of music's biggest names deferred to it for a one-night event in front of tens of thousands of people. It was a demonstration that the visual architecture of ANYMA was not a supporting element. It was the draw. The system had become bigger than any single collaboration, and artists at the highest tier of the industry recognized it.
Every step — Ibiza, Printworks, Genesys, the festival circuits, the NFT drops, The Weeknd — had been building toward one thing, even if no one could name it at the time. The culmination arrived in the Nevada desert, inside a building that did not exist when this story began: the Sphere Las Vegas.
"The End of Genesys" was the first electronic music residency at the world's largest and most technically advanced venue. De Vecchi served as Visual Co-Creative Director, overseeing art direction for the entire production — the same role he had held since the beginning, now operating at a scale that would have been science fiction four years earlier.
"A huge part of this world was shaped by Alessio De Vecchi, a brilliant visual artist, whose vision was foundational to the show."
— Alexander Wessely, Flaunt Magazine
"Visual Director Alessio De Vecchi has been a core partner since the project's inception, working alongside Milleri to ensure the music and visuals are created as one cohesive canvas."
— Alexander Wessely, Office Magazine
The Sphere residency ran from December 2024 through March 2025. De Vecchi worked remotely from Ibiza — the same island where this story started — often sleeping only a few hours a night, delivering assets for a 580,000-square-foot LED canvas that demanded perfection at a resolution the human eye was never meant to process at that proximity. The pipeline was unforgiving. The deadlines were relentless. The margin for error was zero. He did it anyway.
"De Vecchi described the Sphere process as grueling, sleeping only a few hours a night as he worked remotely from Ibiza."
— Variety, January 2025
The story of ANYMA is not the story of an artist who was hired. It is the story of an artist who built — from independent working files dated 2019 to the largest visual production in electronic music history. Every frame on the Sphere's interior traced its DNA back to years of prior creative work, a conversation on an island, and a refusal to treat visuals as secondary to sound. Alessio De Vecchi did not illustrate someone else's vision. He co-authored a visual world from its first sketch to its largest canvas, bringing seven years of prior creative work into a partnership that changed what electronic music could look like.
© Alessio De Vecchi. Visual Co-Creative Director of ANYMA. EDM.com Best Visual Artist 2023.