“Jane Lane is a fucking icon,” Josh Urban Davis gushes from his “extremely messy” studio in Oakland, CA. The multimedia designer and I are discussing his recently completed tarot deck, The Deleted World, when we veer off course and somehow meander into the acerbic world of Daria, the cult show’s eponymous, acid-tongued heroine, and her raven-haired best friend, Jane. It’s pure catnip for two 30-something Millennials with a penchant for piercings, “gothy” vibes, and the occult (remember Sick, Sad World?).
“I got into tarot quite young,” says Josh, whose grandmother always had a deck on hand. It was this early exposure that planted the seeds for The Deleted World, an ambitious three-year project culminating in a published, fully functional tarot deck with over 80 illustrations. Created with a mix of technologies, hand-written codes, reduced resolutions, and hand-collaged elements—and absolutely no AI—The Deleted World marries classic occult iconography with computational aesthetics and a healthy dose of surrealism. The colors and compositions draw heavily from vaporwave, a retrofuturist aesthetic that emerged from internet communities in the early 2010s. Its hallmarks include neons, pastels, pink and teal, late ’90s web design, liminal spaces, and glitch art. In The Deleted World, the vaporwave aesthetic heightens the surreality of the pagan symbolism, transforming the deck into a tool for self-discovery in the absence of traditional spirituality.
“Like many queer people who were raised religious, I turned to vague paganism,” says Josh. “We’re all trying to fill the God-shaped hole in our lives with something that’s a little spooky.” Spooky doesn’t begin to cover it. Taken as a whole, The Deleted World is a double-lensed looking glass that transports its users into a liminal space where the past, present, and future converge. Endlessly browsable, the deck features an inventive blend of flat planes, all-seeing eyes, glitchy flowers, neon animals, 18th-century women in towering wigs, and a bevy of “ERROR” messages that persist, despite multiple refreshes, reboots, or shutdowns.
“When the internet was first becoming popular, what drove it and fascinated me was its utopian vision,” says Josh, explaining his impulse to blend pagan imagery with glitches, error messages, and rudimentary computer graphics. He sees an unexpected parallel between the birth of the internet, its God-like powers, and the paradise that organized religion has promised for centuries. “When you're raised religious, you're given this opportunity to reach utopia. You go to church and they tell you about this amazing utopic afterlife that you're going to have. When I came to terms with my own sexuality, I also had to come to terms with the fact that most of these religious beliefs, including the one I was raised with, mean I don't get that utopia. That future for me is canceled. It's been deleted.”
Scroll through to read our interview with Josh Urban Davis, then head to our April 2025 exhibition, Creatures: Mythical to Mundane, to see his submission.
In Today’s Q+Art Interview…
Josh Urban Davis discusses “biblically accurate vaporwave,” his favorite authors, and why the phrase “fake it until you make it” can sometimes be awful advice for artists.
Which cultural concepts, themes, or philosophies inform your work?
Josh Urban Davis: Biblically accurate vaporwave. Victorian-collaged glitch art. Liminal queer vibes, pastel angel dread, and divine retro-futurism. Algorithms as Tulpas and haunted opulence with a CRT glow.
What's playing in your studio right now? Make us a mini playlist.
JUD: “A Drink with the Queen of Wands,” HIIT and Valentina Magaletti; “Unconscious Patterns,” Erwann Texier-Harth and Waagal; “Pire,” Oceanvs Orientalis and IIhan Ersahin; “The Chain,” Kerala Dust
How do you like to start your day?
JUD: Slow. Coffee in bed, the news murmuring in the background, followed by 30 minutes of meditation and a long, luxurious shower. It’s the stuff of lifestyle blogs. But most days? I’m brushing my teeth with one hand, cramming a half-burnt toast in my mouth with the other, and sprinting after a bus like it personally wronged me.
Which talent would you most like to have?
JUD: The ability to fall asleep anywhere easily and sleep like a rock.
What is it that you most dislike?
JUD: When someone who's never done it, doesn't know how to do it, and has no clue how hard it is, confidently decides it's easy.
If you could have dinner with any artist, living or dead, who would it be?
JUD: Suzanne Treister, Max Ernst, Austin Osman Spare. And maybe Francis Bacon—his work is pure nightmare fuel, but in interviews, he’s weirdly charming.
What is the best advice you've ever received? What's the worst?
JUD: Best: “Be good at the things that require no talent. This will take you 90 percent of the way.” Keep a calendar, answer emails, be kind, stay curious, and follow through. Simple, but surprisingly hard.
Worst: “Fake it till you make it.” Sometimes faking it just makes you fake. There’s a fine line between confidence and delusion.
Best: “Be good at the things that require no talent. This will take you 90 percent of the way.” Keep a calendar, answer emails, be kind, stay curious, and follow through. Simple, but surprisingly hard.
Cats or dogs?
JUD: I have two cats named Jynx and Nyx, but I also LOVE dogs.
What does the future hold for tech and AI in artwork?
JUD: New technologies inevitably shape the production of cultural products. Artificial intelligence, in particular, has transformed the creative landscape by making image generation faster, cheaper, and less reliant on years of human training. While this opens new possibilities, it also threatens to destabilize an already fragile cultural economy. Illustrators, animators, and other creative professionals face growing displacement as tasks that once required deep expertise can now be completed in days using AI tools. For example, what once took me three years to create—like my tarot deck—can now be replicated in a matter of weeks by someone with no drawing experience, simply by prompting a machine trained on the labor of others.
Still, we shouldn't reject new tools outright. Technological progress has always been part of artistic evolution. But we must be vigilant about how these tools are implemented, especially when they're deployed by companies driven primarily by profit. Without clear ethical standards and accountability, we risk allowing corporations to exploit creative labor, harvest data without consent, and undermine the value of human expression.
To protect the future of art, we need to demand data autonomy, fair compensation, and legal frameworks that respect artists' rights. AI can support creativity—but only if we ensure that it serves people, not replaces them. The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate human involvement in the arts, but to empower it. Art is, and always will be, a fundamentally human act.
Who are your favorite writers?
JUD: Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Ann Carson, Thomas Tranströmer, and Frank Stanford
If you had to pick one, would you rather be a historically significant or commercially successful artist? Why?
JUD: I remember discovering Mobius and A Humument when I was young—those works carried me through some really dark times. Since then, others have stayed with me too, like Richard Siken’s Crush and Max Ernst’s A Week of Kindness. I think, more than anything, I’d like to create something that offers that same sense of comfort and connection to someone else, somewhere, in another time.
Josh Urban Davis: Website | Instagram | Shop The Deleted World
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All images published with permission of Josh Urban Davis.