B. 1980

Coy Byron (aka TheDigitalCoy / Hubert H. Byron III) is a multimedia poet based in Silicon Valley, California. Born in 1980 to a Filipina mother and black father with Bermudian and North American roots. Coy initially pursued a career in film, media, and design in NYC after graduating from Princeton University with a degree in Politics and studying film, creative writing, and also was part of the Princeton Footnotes (an all-male a cappella group) and Body Hype (a co-ed dance group). After graduating, he studied business at UC Berkeley then eventually transitioned into global management consulting for 10 years, followed by 8 years in enterprise AI, and most recently blockchain data & analytics. Throughout this 20+ year period he created art in private: visual, musical, written (poetry and literature).

In 2021, Coy began sharing his art publicly as an anonymous artist; he then revealed his main identity in 2024 and now splits his time between being an artist and an AI entrepreneur and the creator of ValyssAI (valyss.com), a companion and platform to help people become irreplaceable in the Age of AI. Coy's work has been showcased in physical and digital galleries across Europe and North America. His art has been collected by hundreds of collectors across his different artistic identities (thedigitalcoy and other anonymous identities). 

Imbedded within Coy's art practice is an admiration for the publicly private stories of life and the power of anonymity. He is a multimedia poet whose work includes diverse media such as AI digital work, 3D, poetry, music, illustration, video, prose/literature, and voice. He uses these mediums to capture the mundane of the everyday, the mythological, and spiritual to construct a pocket universe of his imagining, which reflects his sardonic romantic vision of the past and future. 

His subjects are figures and events from real life, ancient myths, and fiction but somehow his work manages to present the possibility that they are all one in the same, connected, and in a way all real through the constructs of string theory and the multiverse.  

Coy invites us to experience his pocket universe built on the premise that anything is possible and compels us to imagine a future that is more beautiful than we initially think and one that we can make into reality.

Artist Statement
My art is potpourri; I draw from my diverse background in the arts and technology, my life experiences, and my love of mythology and science fiction to create my art.

I am creating a new mythology; reframing the eternal sleep of Argus Panoptes, the all-seeing god from ancient mythology, not as a death, but as a liberation and window for the viewer into all that has happened or will happen. Lulled into slumber by Hermes, Argus's consciousness was freed. His thousands of eyes in life, no longer bound to a single reality, now become infinite and dream across all of time and space. Argus is a living archive of every story, every possibility, every memory across the multiverse.

My artworks are the dreams of Argus: Every piece of art I create is an interpretation of these dreams. They are visions received from one of Argus's eyes, translated into a tangible form for the audience to experience. This establishes Argus as the foundational lens for my work. His unique perception—seeing all moments, all potential futures, and all hidden connections as part of an "infinite mosaic"—is the guide and explanation for my eclectic aesthetic and conceptual approach.

Where did the concept of “Publicly Private” come from? 

Publicly Private is a term Coy coined in 1998 while experiencing the completely anonymized chat rooms of the semi-early internet. Coy was intrigued by how people could talk about the most private aspects of their lives to complete strangers when they would never reveal it to those “closest” to them in IRL (in real life) or to those who “knew” them. 

Coy sees the next evolution of this concept of "Publicly Private" playing out in Web3 and the Metaverse in an even more complex and interesting way. In Web3 people lead very publicly private lives - they present who they in a very public way while remaining anonymous (anon) or private. Today, people reveal similar things about themselves to people 25 years ago but also include more private things like how much money they have or are making, what they are spending their money on, what art, stories, and memes resonate with them, all while having the ability to live the lives of as many monikers/pen names/alter egos as they desire and can manage. 

Why does "Publicly Private" matter?  

In the IRL world (and even in Web3) our identities and the perception others have of us can be a door opener or closer, and sadly, prejudice and stereotypes do exist. Argus is Coy's key to unlocking all sides of the story. And the Web3 world presents an interesting experiment: in a world where complete anonymity is possible, can people reach a higher level of contentment and "success" in their life if their image is of their own making and based completely on the merits of their imagination, talents, and abilities? And can strong emotional connections be made between the anonymous person/artist, a piece of art, the collector, and people within Web3 communities based on these identities created from scratch? 

So far, the answer is yes and Coy aims to explore and find answers to these questions with his open and anonymous lives. 

What is your perspective on privacy? 

Some of the more interesting stories are the one's rarely or never told. So in that regard, for storytelling, privacy is very intriguing. For Coy's first publicly shared collection titled "Publicly Private: Genesis to Revelation Collection" he tells some of the most private and intimate stories across generations of his family that were captured in heirloom photos. For Private Poet Salon, he tells the private and intimate fictional, imagined, or alternative mythological/historical stories for different figures, some know, many or most rather obscure.