Media Artist Brandon Tay Creates Surreal Animations Adapted From His Dreams
If the world of fashion – and content creation in general – is finally waking up to the limitless potential of animation, well here is one name to know.
By Keng Yang Shuen,
Who: Brandon Tay, media artist
His aesthetic: It’s hard to crystallise Tay’s animations into words. They tend to depict strange, abstract figures morphing from or into alien landscapes that would not be out of place in a Bjork production.
One piece – Fertilising The Ovum (below), available for view on his Instagram account @brozm – shows an egg-like sac murkily transforming into a shape suggestive of a human face, before that too fades away.
Another shows an amorphous blob of half-formed human bodies and faces melding into one another, calling to mind the scene in Terminator 2 where the antagonist T-1000 android flails about as it melts under high heat.
And it’s just as well that his latest works draw on imagery from his dreams (he’s kept a dream journal since 2016). The 39-year-old favours juxtaposition and collaging because he finds that our existing visual vocabulary might not convey what he wishes to express.
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“I think of my work as excerpts from a world perhaps unfamiliar and bizarre, but hopefully with its own internal logic that makes it relatable,” he says. The unique compositions have made him a go-to collaborator among fellow artists – he’s one half of State Sensor, an experimental multidisciplinary practice that explores the boundaries between culture and technology.
What got him started: “I got into computer graphics and animation after failing to become a photographer and filmmaker in my tertiary studies. I’m drawn to digital tools as they enable you to pull from disparate, often impossible sources to create something believably coherent.”
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On Singapore's animation scene: “Because of the pace in which new mediums and platforms emerge today, we’re living in a state of almost permanent future shock, which is both exciting and challenging for anyone wanting to grab a foothold in the industry.
People want sure ways of making a living and being recognised for their vision, but a lack of definition of what that might look like makes it viable for anyone to have a go.”