Taken from the February Issue of Dazed & Confused:

“Doona is an angel. She creates art without artifice; often it feels like there is nothing between the lens and her pure, vulnerable emotion. She is also as lovely and kind as you might imagine her to be.” - Lana Wachowski

She might be an unfamiliar face to western audiences, but in Korea Doona Bae is a household name. Highly regarded for roles in Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and the Japanese film Air Doll (2009), she is able to cherry-pick parts from some of the world’s most acclaimed directors. So her audition for the German $100-million adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas was her first audition in 13 years – but one she was happy to undertake. “I really wanted to work with the Wachowskis and I don’t like big main roles,” Bae says. “If my favourite director gives me a role that is very...” – she pauses to find the right word – “sparkly? A very brilliant character? I’ll do it.”

In her role as clone Sonmi-451 in the dystopian country of Nea So Copros, Bae delivers a poignant performance that required serious prep. She had to learn English from scratch and play three characters, all of different ages and ethnicities. “I was a little bit confused to be absolutely honest,” Bae says of the challenge. “I went to Berlin by myself because I wanted to become Sonmi. She is very miserable at the beginning and I was also really lonely, but Lana and Andy Wachowski were amazing. In the end we were like a family.”

After Cloud Atlas wrapped, Bae elected to travel straight to London to tackle her next project – mastering English. “When filming ended I could still hardly tell my friends and my directors how much I loved them, and how much I enjoyed making the film,” Bae explains. So she spent six months living with her dialogue coach in Primrose Hill, enjoying a spell of rare anonymity. “No one knew me, no one bothered me. It was refreshing.”

What challenge next awaits the multilingual, award-winning actress? Bae remains undecided. But it seems likely she will undertake it with characteristic dedication. “I really love learning and working long hours. I was even jealous of my Cloud Atlas stand-ins because I love being in front of the camera,” she says, earnestly. “In social situations, when I’m surrounded by people, I become very shy. But if there’s a camera in front of me, I feel free.”

Cloud Atlas is out on February 22

Photography Lauren Ward
Styling Sara Paulsen

There are a lot of pretty girls in Norwegian photographer Torbjrn Rdland’s work. Yet his interest in melancholic eroticism is just one aspect of a complicated practice which touches on the meaning and process of photography. Much of his current work seems to be pushing the limits of the body – how it can be twisted and contorted, how skin can be drawn on, covered up, transformed. Working fluidly in colour and black-and-white, Rdland, like Ryan McGinley, has managed to create images accepted by both the “cool” press and art establishment. This January Rdland opens an exhibition in Copenhagen focusing on American landscapes and presidents, especially Reagan and Kennedy. “I’m fascinated by how quickly chaotic reality becomes mythologised. The Ronald Reagan I got to know through news media as a kid is not the same Ronald Reagan children today are introduced to,” he points out. Here Rdland talks to Dazed about his fascination with Americana and our Instagram world.

What do you find interesting about referencing and exploring ideas around Americana?

I’ve always felt connected to American vulgarity – in poetry, pantheism, rock’n’roll and hip hop. Studying visual cultures of Japan, Scandinavia and North America helps me figure out what I’m about and where I can take my photography.

Why did you end up in LA?

I gave up on all the alternatives. Los Angeles is a good mix of villages, cities and nature. And it’s founded on mythology. I don’t know how the place is influencing the work exactly, but I know myself better now than before moving here. I cannot promise that I’ll end up in California though.

Tell me about the role of construction in your images. Are things ‘found’ or are you more interested in creating things to feel ‘found’?

Probably both, but definitely the latter! One problem with so-called ‘staged photography’ is the look of these didactic tableaus, making it very clear that you’re studying a construction. It doesn’t really matter to me how the photograph came into being. The important question is how to see it: how the photograph asks to be read. I can be equally invested in an object I just found as one I waited six months to get or travelled from continent to continent with, but in general it helps to live with it for a while. I typically keep something around for months before dealing with it photographically. Situations with people are always sessions. I decide the clothes and so on. I never just pull out a camera and start ‘shooting’. You can wait around your whole life for something interesting to happen in front of you. I believe in forcing a more active approach.

Yet despite this there is a quietness to your work – is that something you strive for?

No, that comes naturally. My physiognomy is quiet. I strive for action and for the work to speak up.

How and why did you start working with people in contorted positions?

Well, maybe it’s an early sign of decadence if I tire of human figures in more relaxed positions. I hope not. I always try to stretch the medium, to push at the limitations of what I can do within straight photography. Having photographed people for more than ten years, maybe I had to push and bend more drastically to stay interested.

Tell me about your latest book. Why did you call it Vanilla Partner?

The title was free. There were no albums, books or even a kinky movie named Vanilla Partner. And it says something about a relationship I find myself in: photography is my straight partner. I try to introduce fantasy and religion to it, but it’s not easy.

You also seem to be really interested by texture at the moment – something sticky, fluffy, visceral. What is attracting to you to that tactility?

It’s all we have. A painter has the texture of the picture itself, the tactility of paint on canvas. In photography the focus is on how other surfaces are represented photographically. I always look at what painters do.

In a lot of your earlier images you represented women in nature – it’s a classic romantic concept. Were you interested in playing with that art historical heritage?

I don’t play with or reference art history; I see myself as adding to it. To photograph beautiful women in nature was a challenge, partly because it’s inflamed, both aesthetically and politically. I like to think that my images take active part in a discussion on how and what they mean. This was a central aspect of the project from the very beginning. To link a primate to nature makes perfect sense. The real problems start when you say she doesn’t also represent culture, and clearly I’ve never gone there.

What attracts you to depicting femininity in particular? Do you feel there's a tension there as a man?

Yes, the tension can be different – also in a wider sense. Everyone loves and hates pictures of young women. It’s intense! Most people seem so caught up in their own bodies and personal perspectives on this material that they cannot see it for what it is.

A number of the images in Vanilla Partner depict people being drawn or painted or tattooed on. How did this motif develope and what the idea was behind it?

I think it developed from black-metal corpse paint. Back in 2001 I photographed leading musicians on the Norwegian metal scene. Looking at my portraits of Frost (of Satyricon), Abbath (of Immortal) and Infernus (of Gorgoroth) started me thinking about the psychological implications of paint on skin. There’s also a smaller photograph from the following year... it has a German title: Goldene Trnen. This is a portrait of a young woman with lines of honey on her face. An art historian will probably see it in the Catholic tradition of the crying virgin, while a dude reading Dazed online is more likely to see a facial. I’m drawn to pictures that cannot easily be pinned down. I like conflicting readings – I think you find truth there. But to return to the question: there was no initial idea behind all this – maybe more of a longing. I now see painting on skin as an immediate escape from the confusion and boredom of everyday life. Hairless apes have always listened to music and painted their bodies to make life more real. It’s linked to a spiritual longing that is everywhere in my work.

How do you feel about the ubiquity of image culture today, compared to when you started working with photography?

Younger people today seem unburdened by the quantity of photographic images being produced. This, of course, is a healthy attitude. There will always be a need for subtle reformulation. The situation when I started was more anorexic. Reality seemed lost behind an excessive overproduction of photographs. The postmodern mindset saw no reason to make new pictures; we had already produced too many. Reappropriation was almost a moral choice. It’s funny; looking back, the early 1990s now seem like a calm period of libraries and magazines, before the online explosion of Instagram, Tumblr and TwitPics. Today I see Instagram feeds adopting strategies from critical art filtered through the Fail Blog perspective on commodity culture. It’s quite exciting and I’m not contributing.

Your approach has been emulated by a younger generation of photographers, including those working with fashion as much as within an art context. Is that a frustrating or interesting situation for you?

We both know that fashion photographers adopt anything that moves to a beat. I’m actually more puzzled by the massive number of educated young art-photographers who approach the world like an Alec Soth. I always saw my material as coming out of a culture just as much as being the product of my conflicting personality. So I do not claim full ownership.

What do you think the role of emotion is in photography? Is it something you strive to create in your viewer or your images?

That is a very good question – I’m still struggling with it. Asking for an emotional reaction is asking to entertain or to sell something. This, at least, is the standard view. My more emotional photographs are created to make the viewer reflect, but I’ve also seen them have an emotional effect on people and that didn’t seem all wrong. Actually, it didn’t seem wrong at all.

Vanilla Partner by Torbjrn Rdland is out now, published by MACK

rodland.net

There is no war without representation [. . .] Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception–Paul Virilio

If technology turns our modes and acts of vision into violence; then what is it to continually recreate the image? Our new art project wrestles with just this question. The artists in the exhibition don’t take the image’s instability or defacement as loss, and, as with a war of representations, simulation is as much sensory as it is representational.

In his 1989 bookWar And Cinema, French criticPaul Virilio argues that narcotics, lenses, light from both weapons and explosives, radar maps in planes, etc, all form new fields of perception, and change how we place our self as a subject. Virilio refers to German writerErnst Jnger’s memoirs (Storm of Steel) on his experiences during the First World War: as attack and defence weapons develop in unison, so too do viability and invisibility. For Jnger in wartime (viewing his surroundings through devices and representations) “The landscape had the transparency of glass.” As our vision and means of representation become expanded, there is too derailment. The image, damaged as it becomes more prolific.

As an end point to this year’s programme at Arcadia Missa Gallery, artists Clunie Reid and Hannah Perry are each exhibiting one new and previously unseen video piece. The works in the exhibition demonstrate the artists’ processes of appropriation. In the creation of new sentences, Reid and Perry illustrate the vulnerability of the image, via an authorial control that moulds and reinstates it. Below are excerpts from a conversation between Kari Rittenbach and the artists in preparation for an upcoming catalogue text by Rittenbach on their work for their forthcoming volume, Open Office Anthology.

When collecting sound or images for an artwork, what draws you to a particular picture or material? Is it an intuitive thing, or do you look for certain tropes or clichs?

Hannah Perry: I suppose you might call it intuitive, but at the same time I have a methodology which is actually quite rigid. It’s a combination of hearing / seeing things organically and having something stick with you or give a specific meaning to something. I watched a documentary about the comedian Bill Hicks one day while I was cleaning my room. There were some things he spoke about in his stand-up that were so specific and so definite yet he had so much passion. I was moved. And his sentences stuck with me for a very long time. You might be moved (in a good or bad way) when reading a phrase in a book or poem, looking at an image on a billboard, re-watching some footage you shot and noticing a specific glance or gesture. As I look at footage I’ll see other imagery linked to it, in my mind. I might be listening to a song on my iPhone when I’m cycling and think of a bit of video that I shot when I was 18. This is why I listen to music, but also podcasts and lectures, when I’m cycling. It helps to think. My films are presented in a sort of series of vignettes. I want the sections to seem like introductions to different characters, situations, ideas or mise-en-scnes. Because many of these ‘moments’ are nuanced and not merely the sum of all that is ready-to-hand, but a web of significant relations in which Dasein exists. These vignettes enable me to bring up both culturally and personally relevant moments and look at how they are interconnected. There isn’t a single ambition, opinion or issue, but several -- I’m presenting the viewer with a sentiment.

What is the one work of art you can't stop thinking about? Do you find it compelling because it is beautiful, or perhaps because it is terrible?

Clunie ReidI can’t get over Sturtevant’s ability to still pose questions of the ontology of the artwork.

HP Sarah Lucas is my favourite artist. She is amazing. I like her humour.

How does writing work in relation to your practice? Do you keep notes separately and pair them with images as correspondences emerge, or is the writing more like an act of defacement that is intrinsic to the composition process?

CR I’m not a writer at all but I’ve been trying to generate stuff in relation to other texts and images more broadly, as a kind of associative note-taking, but it’s really just sort of arbitrary lists and sequences. Defacement has become a clich of my own making so I’m developing something else. I want language to have a more autonomous function and no longer be seen as a response to the image. The video [in the exhibition at Arcadia Missa] is sort of an extension of notes I took while reading Nick Land's essay "Shamanic Nietzsche"

What is your relationship to video? It seems almost like your drawings and dibond holographs work as sequential frames in an animation storyboard -- is there an inherent narrative arc to them, or is that the point of simultaneous installation (an overwhelming statement)?

CR I have been working in video since 2007 but only showing it sporadically. Quite often the still images come from videos I’ve edited either as superimpositions or layers of a digital montage (photographic not cinematic). The videos are a way of dealing with sequences of still images or layers of stills in order to build their intensity and make them immersive through duration and pulse. I never think in terms of narrative, more of abstract and material sensation.

How does installation feature in your work; is the gallery space an ideal space for encountering your videos and images or do you imagine they might have wider distribution (via television, internet, etc.)?

HP Gallery space only for me usually. If I am asked to do something for an online project then I will make something especially for that, as something outside my practice and different to what I’m usually interested in. I have never really thought about television or radio. I think it could work, but again, I would have to craft something specific for the medium. I typically work towards physical installations.

Can you speak a little bit about the technological time-flattening that takes place when you process video? I like the sense of confusion this produces, because it seems like an attempt to override nostalgia. But is this purely an aesthetic choice?

HP There is an element of nostalgia, especially when I’m talking about identity, but I am also interested in the quality of the footage from a material point of view; looking at the different surfaces and textures. VHS has an amazing quality. When I transfer my new footage onto VHS I like to edit it in analogue with a couple of VHS players and a deck. It’s really hard to control how the frames will jitter. I like this lack of control and trying to control it. I hope that I can push this idea when making new work. I use VHS because of the texture and unpredictability. The footage is often brand new – I’ve been trying to push and confuse the process.

As part of Nicola's Dazed takeover, we invited about five innovative GIF designers - recommended by Nicola himself - to redesign the iconic panda illustration at the heart of his new concept fashion line Nicopanda. We've already had contributions from GIF makers German Lavrovskiy, Mr-GIF, and Akihiko Taniguchi, and now we have work from FashGif.

Started by Greta Larkins, the site FashGif creates GIFs of moving models, in often comic ways, to present all the latest catwalk collections. We asked the self-taught GIF-er a few questions below...

Tell me about the panda GIF you made.

This is actually the first time I've ever made one of those zooming, eternally looping GIFs. The Nicopanda image lent itself perfectly to that style, so I had good fun experimenting and playing with the animation until it was smooth and consistent. Then I mixed up the colours of the exploding eye for fun.

Tell me about your practice and style.

The majority of my GIFs are made from starting with a still image and creating layers that ultimately become the moving elements. A lot of what I do is rebuilding the background of an image; so if I move a models arm I need to recreate what would be behind that arm. If I can execute this cleanly it helps with the overall illusion and makes the GIF more real.

What do you do when you’re not making GIFs?

I work for a company that wholesales jewellery and I spend most of my day on Photoshop re-colouring products (say, making a red scarf green or turning a silver necklace into rose gold) and trend forecasting. That's where my interest in fashion began - but I'm scarily obsessed with jewellery for someone who's surrounded by a lot of it. There's about 100 pieces of jewellery on my desk right now! I'm also learning ballroom dancing and I'm a Tumblr junkie.

How did you start making GIFs?

I always thought you needed some magic program to make them but when I discovered you could produce them in Photoshop I decided to give it a go. I learnt just by exploring Google and forums. It's fundamentally quite simple, the complexity begins when you're ideas get more ambitious or if you want it to look very neat. You need a lot of patience and a steady hand.

What’s your all time favourite GIF and GIF designer?

I'd say that WHTEBKGRND and IWDRM are neck and neck for that title. Though technically IWDRM is making Cinemagraphs. And picking a favourite Gif are you insane?! I probably Tweet "Best Gif ever!" once a week but this is a good place to start if you're new to them.

Recent months have seen a return of the GIF as an item of popular discourse and funny thing to drop into an email. What do you put this down to?

They're instantaneous. And the repetition can really push a message. Nothing beats a perfectly placed reaction GIF either. I always joke with my friends that I haven't seen an episode of Ellen in ages but thanks to my Tumblr dashboard I see the best moments as GIF-sets. A GiIF, some subtitles; you get the gist very quickly without hitting play on a clunky video.

Where do you think the art of the GIF maker is going?

Well at the moment - up! But that's not to say this craze will last forever. That said, they're becoming more and more commonplace so maybe the GIF revival is going to stick around. Advertising companies are catching on now and I think there's a lot of potential to produce clever ideas and execute some stunning visuals. The focus should be on quality over quantity. You can't underestimate the value of a perfectly produced GIF; they can really capture peoples imaginations.

When Nicola first began his Dazed takeover, he emailed us about five innovative GIF designers from around the world. Now, we've asked these Tumblr-ers to make their own adaptation of Nicola's panda illustration, the symbol at the heart of Nicola's new concept fashion lineNicopanda.

We've already had contributions from GIF makers German Lavrovskiy and Mr-GIF, and now we're introducingAkihiko Taniguchi. Having already experimented with the presentation of GIFs in his project, GIF 3D Gallery,where he created an interactive space to display the GIFs as work's of art in a gallery, we asked Taniguchi a few questions about his custom Nico-panda-GIF and the future of GIF-making.

Tell me about the panda GIF you made.

Sometimes I make the visual sketch using processing. And again this time, I made the sketch using processing before converting it into a GIF.

Tell me about your practice and style.

I don't always make GIFs. I'm interested in modeling and composition - how objects overlap - and producing another meaning from there.

What do you do when you’re not making GIFs?

Surf the web. Make art work in other forms.

How did you start making GIFs?

I was seldom making GIFs until now. But I was happy researching internet art and making my own artwork for several years. From those activities, I noticed the importance and peculiarity of the GIF. Then I made GIF 3D Gallery this summer. This is an internet artwork, which can put GIFs onto a pedestal in a 3D gallery, and be viewed online. I made the pedestal for the GIFs at first. Then, I came to make GIFs for the pedestal.

What’s your all time favourite GIF and GIF designer?

Anthony Antonellis, Francoise Gamma and Matt Goerzen. He is mainly a painter, but I think his GIFs are also the concept and statement of his work.

Recent months have seen a return of the GIF as an item of popular discourse and funny thing to drop into an email. What do you put this down to?

1. The decline of the flash and the spread of Tumblr.
2. Increased susceptibility to the internet in daily life.

A GIF format is a very old graphics format. However, compared with other graphics formats, the GIF is special. GIF can use a transparent background and it is always related to a background where it's placed. GIF resembles three-dimensional sculpture rather than pictures and photographs which always cut off the world squarely. GIF exists like a substance with mass.

Where do you think the art of the GIF maker is going?

It is not only a question for GIFs. Some internet artists feel that the relation between actual space and the internet is sensitive. I think that two trials exist there.The first is the trial which tries to place GIFs (internet artwork) in a gallery on the internet, and the second trial which tries to put GIFs in an actual space.It will have to do with the materiality of the aforementioned GIF. I think GIF became a media independent from other image formats. Although it is not applied to all GIF makers, I think how actual space and the internet are mediated/connected is something important to consider.