✟ Creator-in-Residence Application ✟
KAIOTEI
ARTIST ◆ MUSICIAN ◆ BUILDER
Music, art, hardware, games, and an original anime. All of it made by hand.
01 ✦ Hello
Hi Gumroad team,
I'm Kaiotei, an artist, musician and builder from western Pennsylvania, and I'm applying to be a creator-in-residence.
My portfolio is this website. I designed it, coded it, illustrated it and scored it myself, so the fastest way to see my work is to walk through it.
02 ✦ The Work
Start here
Four doors into the same body of work.
03 ✦ By Hand
One person, every medium
What ties it together is that I make all of it by hand. I write and produce the songs. I draw the characters and the covers.
I designed, soldered and shipped AngelGotchi, a wearable digital pet and step counter running my own firmware. It is tamagotchi, grown up: a companion that does better when you put the phone down. Three hardware generations have shipped since early 2025, around 40 devices and 30 DIY dev kits, to customers worldwide.
I built a 3D changing room where clothing I designed is generated as real geometry on a figure, and browser games to go with it.
All of it lives under 13 <33 Covenant, the creative community I founded, which has grown to 7,000+ followers and over 100 live events with no paid promotion.
04 ✦ Next
An original anime
A hacker builds a body for an angel trapped online.
The next thing I aim to make is an anime series, produced with other illustrators. The series bible is written. The working title is 1333 / Angelgotchi, and it is set in 2033.
A broke builder grinding gig work in a cyberpunk megacity makes contact with Angelgotchi, an AI set loose on the early internet on the night of Y2K. She quietly stopped the bug, went rogue, and found faith. Now the internet is drowning in bots and slop, and it is corrupting her. She needs a small physical vessel to escape it, and real-world input to stay whole: paper books, pictures of trees, human steps.
He has no money, no time, and drone parts are regulated. The struggle to build her is the show.
The tone is daily life, friction, humor and persistence. Grinding, doubting, failing, continuing. No filler.
The show and the device come from one story. In the series, the crew builds DIY AngelGotchi devices so the angel can learn from the real world. In real life, I already have. And because the story is about human-made work surviving a flood of slop, it will be made the same way: scripts written by people, designs led by illustrators, key animation drawn by hand.
05 ✦ The Year
What I would do with it
I got here the long way. I've worked construction, warehouses, greenhouses, public works and sales, and built everything on this site in the hours around those jobs. Every piece of it was made in borrowed time.
A year of unrestricted time is the one thing I have never had. With it I would:
- Take the anime from series bible to a finished pilot, working with a small team of illustrators.
- Release the next AngelGotchi, the one the characters in the show carry.
- Write and record a third album as the soundtrack to that world.
- Document the whole year in public, so other independent artists can see how it was made.
Thank you for doing this, and for looking.
Kaiotei