The
Curators

Topher Welsh is a Motion Designer, Digital Futurist, and XR specialist with over 15 years of experience in the intersection of technology and visual communication. His client work spans Microsoft, Amazon, Zillow, and Skype — where he served as UX Motion Designer — as well as teaching at the Northwest College of Art & Design.

In November 2022, Welsh was among the first practitioners to recognize that Midjourney's generative outputs constituted not a technical failure but a new aesthetic language. He began systematically generating, curating, and archiving what would become the Pop Culture Babies collection under the handle @tophmagoph_ on Instagram.

The account grew from 1,000 to 134,000 followers in eight weeks — a growth rate of 12,400% — reaching a peak of 21 million accounts in a single 24-hour period and generating 980,000 engagements. The series was covered by Bored Panda, Design You Trust, and Visualflood Magazine, among others.

Welsh's curatorial method was systematic from the outset: he documented not just the successful generations but the failures, the hallucinations, and the iterative series — producing the archival record that made formal analysis possible.

Eugene Capon is a Social Media Futurist, author, public speaker, and President & Creative Director of Studio Capon — an XR content creation and marketing company with over 50 million impressions across social channels. He is a Principal Advisor to the Metaverse Standards Forum, a Global XR Education Advisor at XRSI, and has advised the United Nations on technology and extended reality.

Capon joined the Pop Culture Babies project weeks after its inception, bringing strategic discipline to a collection that had already gone viral. His role was to recognize what Welsh had built and frame it: not as a social media success, but as a cultural artifact requiring preservation and formal documentation.

His detailed chronicle of the project — "Going Viral with AI on Instagram" — remains one of the primary documents for understanding the collection's historical context and the growth mechanics of the early AI art moment.

Capon is also the author of All The Things You Can Do In the Metaverse and Get Serious About Social Media, and has been ranked among the top 11 global Metaverse influencers by Feedspot.