Niio Editorial
Joseba Elorza—the Spanish artist from Vitoria-Gasteiz better known by his synesthetic moniker MiraRuido—delves into the delicate balance between tranquil aesthetics and underlying tension that defines his signature form of collage surrealism. Originally trained as a sound technician before his passion for visual collage took over, Elorza has spent the last two decades building an impressive portfolio with clients like National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, and Green Day. In this interview for Niio Editorial, the artist discusses his evolving creative process, from meticulously hunting for found footage to carefully integrating AI as raw material for his intricate digital collages.
MiraRuido. 2 Lands, 2026
You have ample professional experience as an illustrator and creator of music videos. In both these types of creative projects there is a strong narrative element that guides each composition or animation. How do you work with this narrative aspect in your work? Does it drive your choice of elements, aesthetics, and the development of each scene, or do you keep to a central form of narration that is the core of your artistic practice?
Two decades of creative work give you room to experiment, and along the way I’ve realized I basically work in two different but complementary ways. One is the obvious one: I open a blank notebook, think about what I want to say, and start sketching whatever visual forms come to mind to say it. The other starts somewhere else entirely. I open the archive of photographs and footage I’ve been collecting for years and just browse through it. Sometimes a photo of a person doing one very specific thing triggers an idea, and I connect it straight to whatever commission or project is sitting on my desk. From there a snowball starts rolling and there’s no stopping it.
The narrative is usually the spine, but it doesn’t always come first. Sometimes I know the story and go looking for the image. Other times the image arrives before I know what it’s about, and the meaning surfaces while I’m building it. What stays constant in both cases isn’t a plot so much as a single situation, usually a figure who’s witnessing something rather than acting on it.
MiraRuido. Hold, 2023
Your visual style could be described as “sunny day surrealism” for its uplifting themes, bright colors, and overall positive and calming atmosphere. What leads you to create this particular ambience in your compositions? Which are your sources of inspiration?
I understand why it gets described that way, though I’d add a layer to it. The bright skies and the calm are deliberate, but they’re a hook, not the subject. What I’m really after is the moment right before discomfort, a beautiful space with something slightly wrong in it that you can’t immediately name. The light and the color are there precisely so the unease lands softer and stays with you longer.
The difference between a piece and a decorative image, for me, is whether something in it quietly refuses to let you feel entirely comfortable. My inspiration comes less from other image-makers than from cinema and from certain everyday situations that already feel surreal on their own.
“What I’m really after is the moment right before discomfort, a beautiful space with something slightly wrong in it that you can’t immediately name.”
Collage animation is a particular form of artistic expression that requires the ability to find the right elements and create a living scene from still, bidimensional images. Can you walk us through your creative process and the making of your animations?
Finding the right elements for a piece eats up a huge part of my time, and it’s something I’ve always loved, that search. They say a person spends a third of their life asleep; I’ve easily spent a third of my working life looking for photos and footage.
These days you can generate your own assets with AI, but my process hasn’t really changed. An animation always begins with a composition in Photoshop. Sometimes I detail it heavily, sometimes less, but the image has to hold up on its own first. Once it does, I rebuild everything in After Effects and the animation begins. Water moves, clouds drift, a flock crosses, but the figure usually stays still. And it’s during that search for material that the work itself can take directions I hadn’t planned, which is the part I find most rewarding.
MiraRuido. Life, 2026
Image generation with AI models is an increasing trend among artists. As a collage artist, how do you approach this trend? What does this technique bring to your work?
For a collage artist, AI is just a different way of getting the material I’m going to cut up anyway. It’s a raw matter that I then run through my own workflow, which stays more or less the same as it always was. Used that way, it’s source material, never the work itself. I’ll be honest that it does put my own moral standards under constant questioning, but then again so do a lot of everyday practices we’ve quietly come to take for granted.
“I’d rather create an artwork on two levels and let the viewer choose their depth than spell out the theme”
Some of your artworks have been conceived as NFTs. What has been your experience in the NFT community and market?
It’s a complicated world that’s lived through its own bubble. But at the time it mattered to me for a very concrete reason. As a digital artist who’d spent nearly twenty years handing his work over for other companies to monetize without ever seeing a cent of it, that moment opened a door: the door to actually living off my personal work. Client illustration and animation have always been my livelihood and I’m grateful for that, it’s wonderful work. But getting to live off the pieces that genuinely resonate with you, with no client brief in sight, is the best thing there is for an artist like me. It was impossible to turn down.
MiraRuido. Roomscape 01, 2023
The Roomscapes series was created during the pandemic, but it still resonates with our daily experience of the spaces we live in and the places we would like to escape to. You have expressed that this project was well received. Can you tell us about its development and what has fascinated viewers about it?
Roomscapes grew out of a previous series called ‘Inside Worlds’, which I made in 2021 with the lockdown still fresh, landscapes folded inside four walls. But I quickly realized those rooms meant something more personal than the pandemic. I’m an extremely introverted person, and my home has always been a refuge that also makes me feel slightly guilty for staying in. That tension, where the interior keeps me safe but the exterior keeps pulling at me, is what the rooms are really about. I think it resonated because everyone recognizes it now: the comfort and the quiet claustrophobia of the space you live in. With Roomscapes I cut the pandemic thread and left the concept open, so each viewer could furnish the room with their own version of that feeling.
“Roomscapes resonates with people because we all experience the comfort and the quiet claustrophobia of the space you live in.”
Decoupled is a particularly evocative and fascinating artwork that has been very favorably received among our audience at Niio. Despite its apparent simplicity, it is an elaborate combination of different animations that has been presented in different formats and contexts. Can you tell us more about this artwork and its making?
It looks simple, but it’s the opposite. The piece is about the sterile dialogue a couple ends up trapped in, the one where you’re not really listening, just waiting for the other person to stop talking so you can say your part. Two figures exchange gestures that never quite connect. The cypresses are their shared world, swaying back and forth in a loop that goes nowhere. And the veil running down the center is the distance growing between them, beautiful and indifferent. I always saw Magritte’s Les Amants as a painting about frustrated passion. Decoupled is what I imagine comes after: the veil is still there, but the passion’s gone and what’s left is the silence.
Technically it’s a combination of separate videos and images that come together to compose one enormous piece.
MiraRuido. Decoupled, 2026
The Afterlife series depicts a series of calm, dreamlike scenes which actually illustrate reflections about life, death, and eternity. The contrast between the peaceful images and the profound themes they address is particularly interesting, but it also might lead to misunderstanding what the artworks are about. How do you deal with the multiple readings of your work?
I don’t try to control the readings, and the contrast you mention is intentional. Afterlife places very heavy subjects, death, eternity…. The risk is obvious: someone sees only a peaceful image and stops there. But I’ve made my peace with that. I’d rather create an artwork on two levels and let the viewer choose their depth than spell out the theme and kill it. The serene surface isn’t a disguise for the dark content; they’re the same thing. Death is dramatic, but it’s peaceful too. It’s the final stillness, the total stop, the most peaceful and the most dramatic thing at once. The series itself is about how I imagine life after death, if it existed at all: as an infinite tension, eternally unresolvable.
MiraRuido. Cloud, 2021
In a similar vein, Death addresses the end of life but it does so through a beautiful depiction, a composition whose theatricality is inevitably mesmerizing. Considering this series, as well as Afterlife, and Life, how do you imagine the emotional response of viewers?
I don’t aim for a specific emotion, and I’m wary of artists who claim they do. What I hope for is recognition more than reaction, that someone stands in front of one of these and feels something they were already carrying but hadn’t seen put into an image. With the death pieces especially, I’m not after sadness or fear. If anything I want a strange calm, the kind you feel looking at a landscape that’s completely indifferent to you. In Death the grand architecture adds the theatricality, that melodrama we’ve all collectively built up around dying over the centuries. The beauty isn’t there to soften the subject. It’s there because I think these themes really are beautiful, in a way we’ve been taught to find frightening.
“The real challenge is keeping the work recognizably yours as it moves between contexts that each pull it in a different direction.”
You have exhibited your work in art galleries, festivals, public spaces, streaming platforms such as Niio, and have even created merchandise. What can you tell us about the possibilities and challenges that artists face when distributing their work through these different spaces and channels?
Each channel asks for a different version of the same work, and each one teaches you something. Galleries and festivals give you context and credibility but reach few people and move slowly. Public space is the opposite, enormous reach and almost no context, so the work has to land in three seconds. Streaming platforms like Niio are the most interesting shift for me, because screens are everywhere now and a moving piece can finally live in a space the way a painting does, only designed for light and time instead of canvas. Merchandise is humbler but honest; it’s how people who can’t collect a piece still get to take it home. The real challenge isn’t picking one channel. It’s keeping the work recognizably yours as it moves between contexts that each pull it in a different direction.
