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 a creative partnership - two people with complementary obsessions sitting across from each other for months, developing concepts together, 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 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 craft.
"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. 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 the visual architect a project like ANYMA demanded - someone who could co-author the full experience.
The conversations in those early meetings were not one-sided. They discussed the visual world as thoroughly as they discussed the music — an open dialogue in which image and sound shaped each other from the first idea. Milleri at the time was considering performing masked, remaining anonymous behind the stage. The visual universe De Vecchi would build around him was in part a way to give the project a face that was not Milleri's own — a character system that could carry the public identity of ANYMA while the musician stayed in the shadow behind the music.
EVA's origins trace back earlier than 2021. The character — a robot, a humanoid, a figure suspended between the mechanical and the divine — was conceptualized by De Vecchi in 2019 and executed in 2020, emerging from years of independent work in CGI character design. Working files from that period show Sphere-scale concepts, robotic humanoid figures, and the visual language that would later define the project. By 2020, De Vecchi was releasing 3D digital robot and cyborg works on SuperRare — the same aesthetic DNA, the same sculptural intensity, the same uncanny tension between human warmth and machine precision. It was a body of work with a market, a following, and an artistic identity with its own momentum.
The 3D asset that would later become Lilith also traces its origins to this period — a complete character with head, body, and facial animation that De Vecchi conceptualized and executed in 2019 for his film project UTAE, where it existed as "super utae." Google Drive metadata timestamps the working files to July 9, 2019, two years before ANYMA existed. The asset was carried into ANYMA in 2022 and renamed Lilith.
In 2021, the partnership crystallized. De Vecchi brought EVA - a character he had already been building for years - into a new context. From her first ANYMA iteration — EVA 0, minted on SuperRare — she carried the weight of everything the project would become. She was the thesis statement: 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
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 an existing artistic practice that converged with Milleri's musical vision.
EVA 0 debuted as a digital artifact on SuperRare, then crossed the threshold from screen to stage on November 28, 2021, at Printworks London. That night, an audience stood inside 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 taking shape in a converted industrial printworks in South London.
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, presence. Then SYREN, fluid and dangerous, pulling narrative gravity in yet another direction. Each character was designed as a node in a story that audiences would piece together across shows, drops, and seasons.
De Vecchi 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 to the largest LED surface ever constructed. This was infrastructure.
This work happened in constant dialogue with Milleri, whose musical direction shaped the emotional register of each character. 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, De Vecchi's visual direction was widely recognized across the electronic music industry. EDM.com named him Best Visual Artist of 2023 - a rare individual-artist recognition in a field that typically credits acts and labels. The award acknowledged the distinctive visual identity ANYMA had established across its live performances.
In September 2024, De Vecchi served as Art Director for ANYMA's collaboration with The Weeknd in Sao Paulo. The Weeknd - one of the most commercially dominant artists on the planet, a performer whose stadium tours are themselves exercises in visual ambition - stepped into ANYMA's world for a one-night event in front of tens of thousands of people. The visual system De Vecchi had built was so distinct, so fully realized, that it became the canvas for a collaboration at the highest tier of the industry.
Every step - Ibiza, Printworks, Genesys, the festival circuits, the digital art releases, 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 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 and a conversation on an island. Alessio De Vecchi 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.