Intranet Girl is forging a 3D cyberspace of her own

Intranet Girl, or Intra, is a 3Dx multiformat artist from London, who grew up on a diet of salvaged digital parts and stop motion animation. Over the years, she’s developed a deep-rooted relationship with Jungle music and storytelling through motion, using 3D open source software Blender as her chosen tool. Through the screen, she’s arrived at collaborations with Junglist record producer and DJ Nia Archives and Brighter Days Family among many others, and has developed a loyal YouTube following.

Her path to 3Dx, the name for which she coined herself – “in the algebraic sense, the ‘x’ is a variable that represents all the practices that fall under visual communication” – arose from the realisation that 3D artists often act as full-stack designers, from beginning to end. The process involves graphic design, modelling, rigging, simulating, texturing, lighting, composing, compositing, editing, and so on. Demanding as it comes, this breakdown demonstrates how design and technology intertwine for Intra, something she saw little representation of during her time studying computer science at university, where she found “they didn’t appreciate any kind of artistic deviation”.

Intra has been on a creative path from a young age; she tells us that she once wrote in her childhood diary ‘when I grow up I want to be a scientist and a graphic designer’. Since this budding creative vision, she’s forged an unlikely path, one that was once denied to her through traditional means. But, over time she has noticed changes in the design space, with 3D becoming more and more legitimised and included within softwares. Living in the unconventional, Intra is a leader of this new cohort of 3D designers – or 3Dx, as she calls it.

Intra’s YouTube presence can only be described as trailblazing. Her first Blender tutorial – a breakdown of how to animate a supermarket conveyor belt – was posted four years ago. At the time, the Blender tutorial landscape was dominated by depersonalised and sterile videos. Intra wanted to talk about newfound techniques, and shared her alternatives to a growing audience looking for personal and engaging how-tos. Through Intra, a pocket of YouTube was created for leftfield and unconventional 3D design with a focus on the playful and fun possibilities of a daunting software. The channel became a gateway for design hobbyists and future 3Dx-ers alike.

Eventually, these explorations led her to marry her love for design with her love for music. She bonded with Nia Archives over their shared appreciation for Jungle music, working with her on the Silence Is Loud tour live visuals, promotions, and event artworks. Her recent work with the collective Brighter Days Family, she describes her role as “contributing with a visual offering”. The artwork for their album Audio Sunrise was born from reflections on her relationship with the family. She takes charge of the crackle, with the cover’s singed texture dotting the geometrics. Intra immerses herself into the worlds she designs for, creating graphic identities deeply rooted in the music itself.

In her personal project Blue Tenet Intra takes this self-immersion one step further – quite literally. An exercise of introspection for Intra, she recreated her likeness with painstaking detail, a project that required her to staring into a mirror for weeks as she developed the piece. She describes the process as “intimately frustrating”.

When it comes to wider visual and sonic influences, Intra leans on the world around her. She says: “I draw inspiration from observation. The overlooked, the discarded places, the humble objects that do such a great job at being uninteresting.” She zooms her focus in on the “crevices of life that don’t impose upon themselves”, making sense of the world’s humility. Sonically, Intra is inspired by the duality Aphex Twin presents, picking at “the intersection of order and chaos” and “syncopated mayhem to quiet pensive softness”.

The future of Intranet Girl looks bright; she’s already laying its bricks out by developing her skillset through commercial projects. Intra ends: “I’m ready to delve into creating a body of personal work which leans into my penchants for absurdity and abstraction”.