ISSUE #05 : playtime

Natalia Stuyk

Natalia Stuyk is a British Granada-based video artist who utilises video and animation manipulation to produce whimsical environments and fractional nature. Reordering and reshuffling how the natural and digital world collide the work emits mischievous escapism, even though often confined to a personal device screen. At a time when we are looking at revaluing societal rules and shifting the cultural necessities, Natalia - through both her use of digital collage as raw material and deliberate dreamy making for social media platforms - reminds us of the necessity for playtime.

Hyper-saturated, hallucinogenic, and dimensional Stuyk uses visual language to play between the coexistence of the virtual and real; the human and inhuman; the macro and micro. Often animated, motions vary from a slow rhythmic simmering to patterned choreographed movement akin to a digital revamp of a Busby Berkeley performance. The accompanying audio compositions in videos such as Swarmer, include tonal echoes and aquatic-like percolation to place our minds on holiday into a constructed natural environment. Conversely, in Vicki✿, a text-to-speech app reads aloud a monologue produced via an automated text-generator software emoting a synthetic authority.

On playtime, Natalia’s defiant and disco practice questions standards; from her digital approach to infinite escapism to (and perhaps most succinctly) her liberated viewing stage of social media and other accessible digital platforms.

Tell us a bit about yourself - who you are, your background and what you create?

NS: I am a video & installation artist from London, but now I live in the south of Spain. I create work to escape real life.

For some people, the digital world can make them feel anxious or overwhelmed. Your art, on the other hand, feels fun, playful and through its rhythmic nature, calming; offering moments of escapism. What is your creative process like, and how do you end up creating such spelling-binding pieces?

NS: That's really nice to hear, thank you. For large-scale pieces (installation or event work with no sound) I see it as creating a window into something other-worldly, usually a response to something I've read or seen that's stuck in my head. When it's a piece with sound, that always comes first, and the visual is totally constructed around the pace/texture of the audio. A lot of my videos start off as blocky 2D animatics to get the timing right and to plan where everything is going to go.

The loops I share on Instagram are snapshots of specific moments from larger pieces or projects I'm working on, which I've adapted for the platform. I tend to favour slow looping rhythmic motion because it gives you more time to see and appreciate all the parts that come together to create that moment. You don't get interrupted with a beginning and an end. Like with sound where you hear a short clip on loop, the more you listen, the more different clicks or noises become more apparent; the sound stays the same but the way you hear it evolves over time.

Your project Found in Adobe Stock took a really interesting and playful approach to a type of content that is often considered generic. Can you talk us through the brief and the work you produced?

NS: The brief was to create GIFs from Adobe Stock images to show how cool Adobe Stock is. I think I picked a series of geological stock images because I liked the textures the most and I could construct 3D shapes from them, extruding the contour lines and layering in 3D space in After Effects. The approach was very simple and very time-consuming.

If 2020 was a GIF, what would it be?

NS: All of these combined.

Can you guide us through how your live VJ set at MIRA festival played around with the expectations of a typical gig-watching festival experience?

NS: I don't think there was anything atypical about that VJ set! But it's a situation I enjoy a lot: responding to music extemporaneously and attempting to match the sound with an appropriate visual is really fun.

I'm currently working on an interactive live visual set for electronic producer Mssingno. It's controlled more like a video game and makes use of generative/reactive elements as opposed to the traditional VJ set where I'm just mixing pre-recorded video clips. This makes the live experience far more visceral and is also adaptable to other mediums.

Your latest work Swarmer is mesmerising and otherworldly. Can you tell us more about it?

NS: Thank you :)) that video's actually from 2017, I just found it on my Google Drive recently. It's a take on emergent behaviours (I was reading Steven Johnson's book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software at the time). The approach is much like all my other personal work: I put together a piece of audio and express the sound visually.

Your art naturally comes alive in spaces such as social media and isn’t confined to traditional venues like galleries or screenings. Do you feel the scene/demand for creating art for online platforms is evolving? And in your experience, are digital artists becoming more widely accepted in the art world as those working with traditional mediums?

NS: I have a love/hate relationship with social media - I mostly use it because I have to. Viewing art on Instagram inevitably diminishes & devalues the amount of work visual artists put into their art. It's like only ever listening to music on pound shop headphones. As tech advances and we get faster internet speeds, there will be a gap in the market for a platform for digital creators that values quality over clicks/views/ads/engagement.

There's a lot of discussion surrounding the value of digital art at the moment, and I find that the voices that are the most defensive about traditional gallery spaces and preaching the supremacy of fine art are probably just scared of the future and becoming irrelevant. Even as someone who went to art college, I am baffled by the inflated worthiness attached to fine art practices vs digital ones. I guess computers just aren't bourgeois enough yet.

What do you in your 'playtime'? How do you switch off and unwind?

NS: I live very close to the mountains and very close to the beach so I spend a lot of time outdoors and not looking at screens.

Natalia Stuyk, Wish You Were Here, 2018 (digital still)