(soft mystical music) - [Mows510] Hi, I'm Mows510, I go by mouse.

I make street art.

I make small doors, and I decorate them different ways, collaborate with artists around the world, and I put them up in disused places.

(soft techno music) I was using Google Street View, and I was exploring a back alley in Paris.

And while I was looking around in this back alley using Google Street View, I saw a big stencil, a big purple hippopotamus stencil on a wall.

Looked around Paris for others of that same thing, and I found, every time I would find one by them, I would find others by these other artists.

I later found out this was a kind of movement back during the eighties, the stencil movement.

So, I became really interested in tracking that down.

I go to Paris fairly regularly, so the next time I was in Paris I took pictures of those, found other street art.

I took lots and lots and lots and lots of pictures, and I would go back year after year and I would take lots of pictures.

I was more like someone who follows sports or football, I followed street art and the specific artists, and, yeah, big time fan.

I was collecting ideas of stuff that would be really cool to do.

But, I couldn't see myself doing it.

I had this preconception of art that in order to do art you have to be good at art.

I was in London, in the Shoreditch area, and I was just poking around, specifically looking for street art, and I saw this foam rubber, neoprene shape, it was about quarter, about the size of a book.

It was so simple, just so simple.

It kind of kicked me over the edge of, okay, I can do something, I can start simple, because it was simple but it was really cool (chuckles).

One of the earlier doors that I did was kind of a shout-out, thank you to him, and I did want that character on one of my doors because the door is the same shape.

He sent me a text, he said thank you.

He's an artist in Poland.

We started texting back and forth, and through the texting we became, I think, pretty good friends.

There are nights were went spent a couple of hours texting back and forth, and we've done numerous collaborations.

(soft mysterious music) Back then I was putting them up in the dark of night because I was convinced I was gonna be arrested and thrown jail for life.

So I'd put them up in the middle of the night, and the next morning I'd go by and take pictures of them.

One morning I came by to take a picture and a woman walking her dog says "Are you part of the Facebook group?"

I'm like, what Facebook group?

And she said there was a Facebook group that was crowd-sourcing the locations of all of the doors.

There's almost 2,000 people in this Facebook group and they've got maps and they've got infrastructure.

(laughing) Yep.

Startled, the first time I found out there were a lot of people that were paying attention to them.

I didn't think anybody was noticing them.

I'm not what people expect to be going out and doing these kinds of things, which is to my advantage (chuckles).

Not an artist, I mean, I call myself an artist now.

That was the funniest thing, is for probably the first year and a half of doing this, I'd described myself as someone who does art.

I couldn't even use that word artist because it felt so pretentious or posing or taking on a mantle that I wasn't.

I only recently became comfortable calling myself an artist.

And one day, I was like oh, I'm an artist (laughs).

(jazzy techno music) When I started doing collaborations, I would approach some people, but other people I was like, well, they're too big to even approach.

But, over time, some of the people did approach me.

People that I had seen in the UK.

I kind of worked my way into the process for it.

At first, it started off, I would send somebody a blank door and they'd do something with it, and I might see it on their feed someday, or they might send me a picture of it when they were done.

More recently, what I do is I collaborate, I send them a door, they do stuff, I ask them to do two of them and send me one of them for my collection.

And there's that moment where I know the artist and I know the artist's style, but I don't know what they're gonna do with the door.

And they'll send me their door back, and I'll open it up and I'll look at it, and it's in their style, but it's on my door.

And seeing that shrunk down but totally encapsulate, it grabbed all that I like about their art and seeing it on my door, that's that moment that gives me the tingles, or whatever.

(laughs) I mean, I get stoked by that.

It's like fandom is gone, it's like now you're one of them.

It's like you're not watching the football game, you're down on the field all of a sudden, and you're carrying the ball, is what it feels like.

And you've kind of forgotten that you were a fan.

You don't identify as a fan anymore, you identify as an artist.

(playful piano music)