Vastlab LA Experimental Film Festival - Questions and Answers.

Introduce yourself. what do you do and why? If you’ve participated in our Q&A before…what’s new? My name is Tristan Zand. I’m an intermediate artist with a focus on photography, music, and code. My work explores the shifting threshold between the analog and the digital, between the embodied sensuality of the real and its algorithmic abstraction. I’m interested basically in how perception, memory, and emotions are encoded, compressed, re-emitted through artistic expression and technological systems. I try to understand how these systems in turn become part of our biological and cultural feedback loops. What’s the question your work keeps asking (whether or not you want it to)? One of the questions my work keeps asking, whether I want it or not is… Well basically my art becomes less a monument or a message and more of a living substrate, trying to explore reality and what it means to be conscious and exist in the present. And it’s this kind of cultural agar, where unexpected forms can emerge and mutate, not only from coherent human-made cartesian logic but also from magical mythologies and of course nature. It is through these layered screen-based interventions and participatory structures that the questions arise. I aim to open spaces of attunement, to sense our way through it together, with my public, and yeah that’s basically: what does it mean to exist and be conscious. How do you decide which ideas deserve your time? I often follow my intuition in my desires to explore ideas that make my curiosity flourish, then through public facing works that incorporate AI, custom protocols, analog processes, I aim to create works that help communicate the feelings that I find the most meaningful, and maybe also some explanations, and explorations from my original questions. My works can sometimes be photographs, drawings, books or streamed audio and video, and yeah I see them as living surfaces. It doesn’t really matter what the medium is. They’re kind of sites where perception participation remain open-ended in relation to the public. What’s one thing technology can’t (and shouldn’t) replace in your process? One thing I feel that technology does not, and will not replace in my artwork is the meaning of the existence of my art protocols. My human choices, and when, and what to create the seed of randomness that conferred to the start of a piece and to that creative process, all the basic natural elements that let me go further and end the creation. It’s also the curation of the material that will always have to be from my own mind and heart, and not a technological selection. I think that’s really the important point. If your work had a smell, what would it be? If my work had to be a smell, I would have conceived it as such. Smell is a very interesting medium, it is very deep. While you can go really down into the core of memories, I think its inherent lack of narrative resolution makes it closer to a craft than an art. It’s only trying to imitate most of the time, and it’s rarely transcending into an art form beyond the natural replication of what it could be in the world we live in, either natural or technological. It rarely transcends into art without additional images, sounds or physical representations. And I think that’s why most of the companies that do smell, that do perfumes, really rely strongly on images, or sounds, or music and not the other way around. What’s a belief about art you’ve outgrown? A belief about art that I have outgrown would be that art can be apolitical. For a long time I thought that my art was not that political, but even if it isn’t political in its essence, I definitely believe now that the sole act of creating and sharing it to a public is political. It represents the position of the creator, the artist, into a community, into a a political organisation, and yeah that’s something I definitely have outgrown, I think all art is political in some way. What’s the hardest part of turning the thing you see in your head into something real? I believe the hardest is often finding the time to start building a creative protocol. I’m a protocol artist originally, and the question is how am I going to experiment, and how am I going to research, and which medium will I choose to express my feelings or findings? Will it be video, drawing, photography, sound? At what point in time? How will I do it? In what context, a collective, individually? Will it be a performance or something built as a static object? That’s for me where it is kind of hard to transform what’s in my head to reality. But once the protocol makes sense and the first creative results come out, I really feel that the process simply takes over and makes it relatively streamlined. Do you have a personal ritual that makes your work better? I think a personal ritual that make my work better or might make my work better, is to always put myself as an anonymous amateur looking at my own work, trying to enjoy it as if I was not the creator, and I think that’s a really interesting process to make my results more meaningful. I have to satisfy my desire as a viewer or as a as an amateur to enjoy it. What film, album, book, or artwork do you return to when you need to remember who you are? I don’t think there’s any film, album, book, or artwork that I return to when I want to remember who I am. Or it’s usually a return to my latest creations. I think looking at my latest creations is definitely a way to remember where I had left off and who I am. It’s a really good reflection of a certain moment in my life, in a certain time lapse, or capture of what my present reality is, and that’s where I will go back to try to remember who I am, and then, of course, move on. If you could send one piece of advice to your younger creative self, what would it be? I would say don’t fear not understanding why you do things. Yeah, you have to remember that life is an adventure that’s worth taking risks for. It’s not always very clear at the time of choice, when you start trying to create, and I feel like when I was young, I would be more prone to be scared of taking risks and going into the creative process itself. You shouldn’t think about it too much, and I think that’s what I would give myself as a piece of advice. Until proven otherwise, we only have one life, it’s pretty linear from birth to death. So yeah, follow your truth regardless of the judgments of others. Of course take advice to make it happen better, learn step by step, but yeah, don’t be afraid of taking risks and following your inner vibrations. You can find the festival on their webpage for more information https://vastlab.org, and my works as usual on the https://zzz.ch website.