The squares now have a life of their own. Resident Advisor invited him to guest edit their platform in response to a square he posted about gatekeepers and in 2022 he was invited to become an honorary academic staff member at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), as the institution’s first Community Fellow. His December lecture packed out the lecture hall and followed the inaugural Yellow Squares lecture in central London which featured a guest spot from grime legend D Double E.

Right now, he’s in Thailand on a month-long Muay Thai retreat, closing the app and hitting the martial arts thing. Recent conversations in Australian coffee shops or in the early hours of a New Zealand drum n bass club set have confirmed that the Yellow Squares are resonating outside of the UK context. “What’s piled onto us is pessimism,” he says. “People have to work to look at the world differently. Even the squares being yellow and bright, that’s helpful. I’ve never been accused of being too happy, but I would like to at least radiate some sort of positivity, in my own way.”

How do you explain the Yellow Squares to people who don’t know anything about it? 

I’ll say I work in artist management and that I use Instagram to share things I’ve been thinking about. If someone already works in a creative field, I’ll say that I’m testing to see how much of what I think is true. I’m testing my own process.

What do you think it’s for? 

For me, it’s exercise. Most of the things that resonate is people talking to themselves [in the comments] – ‘oh, this is something I was already thinking’. We’re going through the same challenges together and processing it. I’m trying to be less abstract about positive change that I want to explore, and actively doing it. Like when people say music brings communities together – how? Or when people say about representation, ‘oh, I saw a Black person or a woman doing something’ but it takes time for that person to react or make the thing or write whatever they were inspired by. With this, I can post something and someone will come back straight away. It’s not theory.

The posters strike me as being like your version of the Boy Better Know T-shirts, which revolutionised the way grime intersected with merchandise…

I haven’t gone full tilt on the posters. I was sending them out myself, so if I’d had to deal with thousands, it’d have been a nightmare. I was doing 30 or 40 at a time. I’ll revisit it when I’ve got another reason for people to have it in their house. I want to make things that are of utility. The poster looks cool and it serves as motivation but I don’t want my work to sit in the motivation category. You can see motivational quotes all day on Instagram – but what does it make you do? Boy Better Know literally made me start Butterz. When they put those three words on the t-shirt, it was like a bat signal.

I saw the version of the poster you made for Scratcha DVA where you changed the words so it read Close The App Make The Fing, like a poster version of a special or a dubplate. Any others?

There’s the meta version, of me inside the poster. One for [I Am Grime label founder] Jammz who had a pink cover for his album so I did a pink version. I’ve done a few lock screens for people.

Most commented post on the Yellow Squares?

I did one on hard work. It comes up often, in many forms. Everyone interprets that statement so differently. I need these things to be open enough for people to put their own meanings to things, or to give me a different perspective. Sometimes if it lands in a particular pocket of audience, it doesn’t hit well. I have to let people have that space to vent and – at least on the internet – I don’t mind being a punching bag. I know it’s not personal. There was another one at the beginning of the year, which was a bit of a mouthful, which was deliberate: ‘How can I get paid to make whatever I like, with people enjoying it, without me having to promote it, whilst having an above average standard of living, in one of the most expensive cities in the world?’ It’s the question people ask without asking the long version.

Most sticky or controversial post?

My views on social media as a canvas. I’m saying that if you’re going to be on there every day you might as well throw out the engagement, throw out the likes and put something up there that gets you creatively buzzing. It’s just about sharing interesting things. It’s not a marketing strategy, or how to grow your Instagram following. I don’t care. I’ve been through enough cycles to know that it doesn’t matter. Even if my account got deleted or if everyone left Instagram. It’d be fine.

How did your Close The App billboard in Walthamstow come about? 

I just started looking at billboards, what they said, and what they represented. Most of the time I didn’t know what was being advertised, or didn’t care. I thought: What if something intrudes in your line of sight every day, and it could be positive, educational, informative or entertaining? A lot of advertising doesn’t serve any of those purposes. It’s just buy the thing. All of this architecture could be used better.

What effect did it have on you to see the idea up large like that? 

It was funny. I came around the corner, laughed and thought: this thing has snowballed. A random response to a DM has become a thing I could never have planned. Agencies have ten people round the table and all these resources – it was like hacking the system. In my area there isn’t any place to do culture stuff, people generally go to Hackney, go Central. For people who live here, it was like ‘oh! It’s local!’ It feels real. Seeing the thing from the phone in real life feels more real, feels double real. It’s in your subconscious and it’s in your line of sight. Bridging the two worlds of your Instagram and your artistry, making them one and the same thing. Why can’t it be the core message of the thing instead of the Evening Standard gave it five stars. Imagine if you walked past Shabaka Hutchings on a treadmill? [Elijah shared an image of the saxophonist practising on a treadmill at his recent SOAS lecture]. I’d be like ‘who is that?’.

What can you tell us about the words you choose for each of the new billboards that you’ve done as part of Your Space Or Mine? 

‘Close The App, Make The Ting’ is the signature. Having it across two billboards is cool too [one billboard says ‘Close The App’, the other says ‘Make The Ting’] as sometimes just closing the app is the most important thing. ‘The Endz Is A Canvas’: That’s open to interpretation but I’m using the billboards as a canvas to get out the message. But the next layer down is I am able to do what I do because of the area I come from, I started out in East London Pirate Radio, in the Grime scene, and my environment has shaped my career and work. Then there’s ‘Time Is The Creative Director’. Again, that is open to interpretation, but how I mean it is that the idea that works today, won’t work tomorrow, or if you stall on an idea and sit on it for months it may not resonate when you first had that spark. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad work, but I think most of what we consider good work, is more a reflection of good timing.

Can you tell me about the ticker board at Leyton Orient FC? 

That’s my local club. I was at a game, saw the things go past – local cab service, hammers and nails, stuff like betting. I hate gambling. Any way I can take that out of the system, even for thirty seconds, I feel like I’ve done some good. The club were interested in what I’m doing, gave me favourable rates. They’re going somewhere, they’re top of the league, so if it develops into something, that would be cool.

I have a saying that I use in my work: the thing should be like the thing. By that I mean that the things I make should be made and shared in the spirit of the thing I’m conveying, using the practices and attitude of whatever I’m talking about.

That makes me think of skeumorphism, where on your phone, the email app has a letter, or the phone icon is an old school telephone. I think of it like what you said. If the guy says ‘make the ting’, what does he make? If I was just saying it without all these other tentacles then it’s just a motivational quote. I’m trying to show all these experiments. The tune with Jammz, the lectures. They’re part of the art. I’m making an effort to make the thing the thing.

You talk a lot about the problem of equating success with metrics…

This is another thing I haven’t covered well. I need to do a bit more research. All I can share is my own experience, which is that a lot of the success I’ve had is not fundamentally connected to any metric on social media. People see things on socials and they think it happened because of socials. Using the Shabaka Hutchings example. He’d be that without socials. It’s not to do with Instagram, it’s to do with what’s happening externally. Someone messaged me and said ‘I thought you had a lot more followers than you did.’ That’s a compliment.

One of my favourite off-the-cuff phrases from the talk you did at SOAS was “you can’t IP vibes”. What do you mean by that? 

You put in ideas. If you keep it to yourself, nothing happens. There’s a point where you have to let it go. If you’re put deliberately positive energy you can’t be mad about more positivity coming back, someone doing something with it, and it connecting with more people. Some people put a lot of energy into making sure they get credit for everything and it just weighs down the ideas. It’s like putting a straightjacket on the idea, on the possibilities or the development. Sometimes people message me – you need to copyright this. I’m like, ‘why?’.

Who do you consider to be your kindred spirits – or co-conspirators, to use a phrase I’ve heard used by Akil from Resolve Collective?

This could be a thousand people. Everything I’ve ever consumed or listened to, ever read, every possible experience, every question, all the workshops I’ve done with young people and how much I don’t know about being 15. There’s an artist Bui that I responded to on DM – I feel like she created the saying, close the app, make the thing, because she forced the phrase out of me. Ronan Mckenzie is running a gallery, building things she wants to see. Cleo Sol, I just like the music. Mick Lynch. He’s very direct and clear and he’s good at answering questions. He’s never patronising but he’s got this comedic timing when he’s dealing with a very serious matter. I watch a lot of his videos, and I see the way people respond to him. I think that’s how a lot of people would love to be able to speak. It’s truth, data, statistics, fighting against the system, backing your people. That’s maybe an odd list of people: Cleo Sol, Mick Lynch and random people on Twitter with 30 followers who will tweet me something quite insightful.