By Cansu Peker

Juan Alvarez, also known as Wamoo, is a Dominican-born, Washington Heights-raised artist working at the intersection of music, visual art, and live performance. His practice blends video and self-produced music, drawing from his experience immigrating to the United States as a child. Video games and music served as both a means of adaptation and a coping mechanism, shaping his artistic language. Through experimental music videos, self-produced footage, and found media, Wamoo remixes early digital aesthetics, characters, and cosplay to construct multi-dimensional experiences that merge personal history with pop culture.

His creative process is deeply rooted in the tradition of sampling. Influenced by hip-hop producers like J Dilla and Pete Rock, Wamoo applies a similar collage-based approach to video, treating found footage, digital artifacts, and cultural references as building blocks for new narratives. His work examines how meaning shifts when familiar imagery is placed in a new context, reframing history and emotion through dynamic visual and sonic storytelling.

Humor and absurdity play a key role in his work, creating a tension between hyperactive visuals and deeply personal themes of fear, rejection, and self-actualization. Through his unique fusion of music and visual art, Wamoo challenges perceptions and reimagines cultural narratives with an innovative and deeply personal touch.

We asked Wamoo about his art, creative process, and inspirations.

Can you tell us about your background as a digital artist? How did you get started in this field?

I started as a beat maker. When I was 12, my mom would take me to her friend's house in Yonkers, and her children were playing around with something called Fruity Loops on their computer. They would make reggaeton beats, trying to find the right snare and kick for their beat, and I thought, I wanna do that. So I went home, found a cracked version of it, and started making beats.

Getting into video was almost entirely an accident. Years later, a beattape I released during the Blog Era days, We Float, got a little bit of buzz online, and was approached by blogs and PR agencies to promote the work. One of them asked if I had a music video ready to promote the album. I reflexively said, Yes…I do, and immediately got on iMovie to make something overnight. Nothing came of that opportunity, but the thrill of making that work is something I wanted to experience again, and again, and again. Eventually, I started creating my own music videos to go along with them.

That’s really the root of my practice—this instinct to create something from what’s already available, whether it’s making music, video, or art. It wasn’t a formal process of deciding, I will now be a digital artist—I was already one before I had the language to describe it. My early work was about layering different sounds and visuals to tell a story, a process that has since expanded into the larger, more immersive multimedia projects I create now.

Your work often reimagines found footage and existing aesthetics — can you tell us about your creative process?

Before I was a visual artist, I was a musician. I still am one–but when I was primarily focused on music, I fell in love with sampling. I admired how hip-hop producers like J Dilla, Pete Rock, and (dare I say it) Kanye West would take pieces of existing music, manipulate them, add their own drums and bass, and synthesize them into something completely new. That aesthetic—the process of collage—always resonated with me. Most of my music is sample-based, and that same instinct carried over when I started working with video.

When I create video pieces, I work with found footage, pop culture references, and digital artifacts the same way a producer samples sound. It’s about taking fragments of different realities and combining them to see how they interact—to tell a new story, highlight an emotion, or reframe history. My work isn’t just about nostalgia; it’s about how meaning shifts when something is placed in a new context.

I like to infuse humor and absurdity into my practice. I find that using my sense humor into my work to explore very real feelings about fear, rejection, and self-actualization and create tension between those themes and hyperactive visuals and music is my own personal recipe to create work that speaks to people.

This approach also extends to Tranquilo, my recently concluded video art series, where I blend video game aesthetics, archival material, and contemporary digital imagery to explore themes of immigration, identity, and self-discovery.

Early digital aesthetics are a big part of your visual language. What draws you to those pixelated, glitchy, lo-fi styles?

Back in the day, I used to say I just like the way it looks, but digging deeper I realize it also holds deep personal meaning. When I first immigrated to the U.S., life felt chaotic—my family was looking for work, and we were constantly moving until I started school. Playing video games gave me a sense of control amidst that transformation. Whether it was making a character jump or throwing a banana in Mario Kart, those small acts of agency meant something to me.

Early video game aesthetics—pixelated, lo-fi, imperfect—are tied to that formative experience. They represent a time when I was adapting, learning, and making sense of the world around me. That’s why they keep showing up in my work; they’re not just visual choices, they’re emotional ones.

Your work exists in multiple forms; on screens, as performances, as music. How do you approach translating your digital ideas into live experiences?

I’ve always been a performer. As a musician, I DJ, I rap, I take up physical space. But digital art often exists in a two-dimensional plane—on a phone, a computer screen, or a projector. That’s never felt enough for me. I want people to experience my work in a way that feels ephemeral and fleeting, the way live performance does.

So, I find ways to merge the digital and physical. I might perform in front of a projection of my own work, interacting with it through movement, music, or spoken word. When I exhibited Tranquilo, I didn’t just show digital works on tablets—I also incorporated a graffiti mural and built an environment, with the help of Oye Group, an artist incubator and theater company in Bushwick, that blurred the line between exhibition and performance.

I want audiences to feel something—to be inside the work, not just looking at it. I also want and crave connection. Not just for me, I want and strive to make work that makes people feel seen, and helps people see each other.

How did immigrating to the U.S. as a child influence the way you see and create art today?

Speaking two languages is wild. When I first came to the U.S., I didn’t speak English at all, but I liked English music, NSYNC, Snoop Dogg, etc.. It just sounded like cool gibberish to me. That experience shaped the way I consume and appreciate art—I don’t need to understand something linguistically to connect with it emotionally.

Because of that, my tastes are really broad. I listen to a lot of non-English and Spanish music, even if I don’t understand the lyrics–French, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean music, all types really, but those are a few that come to mind. The same goes for visual art; I’m drawn to works that evoke a feeling rather than just a message. My art follows that logic—I build worlds where meaning isn’t always immediately clear, but the emotions are.

It’s not always a plus – it’s incredibly hard for me to watch TV without subtitles, a habit I picked up when I was learning English. It’s probably something my monolingual friends get annoyed by. It has caused some fights with my girlfriend, haha.

You mention that video games played a big role in your life growing up. Do you remember a specific game or moment that really stuck with you and shaped your creative work?

There are a few, but the first game I still remember the visceral feeling of beating it was Mega Man X when I was seven. The music in that game was incredible—I still remember the end credits theme, and it stuck with me. It really felt like I had achieved something. Those moments—the electric guitar and the visuals of Mega Man walking in solitude across the city as the end credits rolled…the sense of completion—left an impression on how I think about storytelling in my work.

It felt different to a lot of the stories that were read to us in class, like The Very Hungry Caterpillar or Where the Wild Things Are, in that my actions dictated how the story was told and when events were triggered. I was, through the controller, a character in the story. The formative experiences I had with video games have had a huge influence on me in wanting to tell stories, to have an outlet for my feelings, to be an artist.

What’s the most unexpected or experimental thing you’ve tried during a performance? Did it work out the way you imagined?

I was in a band about seven or eight years ago called Conquista, and we played a Halloween show at Bushwick Public House (RIP). It was hot, and at one point during a drum solo, I decided to take my shirt off.

Big risk—I’m a scrawny guy, and I wasn’t sure how people would react. But the moment I did it, the crowd went wild. It was unexpected, but it felt right in the moment. Sometimes, you just have to lean into the chaos and see what happens. One thing I’ll note is that I may be blurring my memories here, as I have removed my shirt playing a show at Bushwick Public House more than once, each instance triggering a similar reaction, hahahaha.

If you could collaborate with a video game or music artist from your childhood, who would it be and what would the project look like?

For a video game, I’d love to work with the team behind Katamari Damacy. That game is wild—you roll a tiny ball around, picking up random objects until it becomes this absurd, massive thing. That energy, that playfulness, really aligns with how I approach art.

For a musician, if I could bring J Dilla back, I’d love to pick his brain about making beats. The sampling, the drum quantization (or lack thereof), the intrinsic life of his beats…man, he was a genius!

Have there been any surprising or memorable responses to your work?

There have been a few, but a more recent experience was last year when I had an art show in Cincinnati at 21c, a hotel that doubled as a museum. My work was displayed on two tablets with headphones, so people could watch the visuals and listen to the music.

At one point, two women walked up, put on the headphones, and one of them just started jamming. She said, This is some Go-Go music right here! I’m feeling this! Seeing that reaction in a fine art space was really validating. She said, I could see myself drinking wine to this, just vibing after work. That moment reminded me that my work isn’t just for art galleries—it exists in people’s real lives.

What else fills your time when you’re not creating art?

Cycling. Funny enough, I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until I was 33. I had a bad fall as a kid, and it scared me off. But a few years ago, I was a PA on a music video shoot where I had to ride a Citi Bike, and somehow, I figured it out. Now, I ride all the time—it’s my favorite way to get around New York. New York is a place that breeds spontaneity. While running errands, you might want to check out a vintage clothing store, or a live band at a coffee shop, and that spontaneity is turbo-charged if you’re on a bicycle. Storing a bike in an NYC apartment is a tough order, so I got a Brompton folding bike, which fits neatly in my closet. I always try to find an excuse to ride it.

I also love traveling. I am always seeking adventure and new experiences. Experiencing the architecture, trying out bars, visiting museums. There’s nothing like trying a new food that escapes your wildest imagination. One of my favorite travelling memories was going on a food tour while visiting Naples, and trying something called a frittatine, which my American brain can best describe it as a mac and cheese empanada. It was so gooey and crunchy at the same time…man, I want another one.