Tristan Jalleh Creates Psychedelic Moving Digital Landscapes

If the future looks like he imagines, beam us up now.

February 16, 2016, 4:36pm

Self-taught by watching "a gazillion YouTube tutorials", Melbourne-based video installation artist Tristan Jalleh creates vast, imagined cityscapes and environments. Predictions of future worlds with aesthetics rooted science fiction inform these digital landscapes, using sourced imagery to construct projections of hyper realities that are augmented, yet feel somewhat familiar.

Choosing ubiquitous tools like Google to source the foundational imagery of his work, part of Jalleh's practice is about recycling and repurposing:

"If you are really trying tell your own story about how you see the world, so much of that is based on stories that you do share with other people, and other people's experiences", he explains, "It's kind of like your own consciousness in that way. I am deliberately drawing on that to try to create this assemblage of my own personality and identity".

Still from Time Crisis, 2012

Currently obsessed with Motion and Pixelmator (previously using Photoshop, After Effects and Combustion), Jalleh cites the development of cinematic technology as his greatest visual influence, drawing on early visual effects such as Rotoscoping in past projects.

Recently, Jalleh's work has served itself particularly well in materializing surreal environments for the dulcet tones of Melbourne singer/songwriter/producer Oscar Key Sung to inhabit.

Creating music videos for 'All I could Do' and 'It's Coming' (the latter of which is nominated for Best Art Direction in the 2014 Berlin Music Video Awards), Jalleh says of the collaboration, "[Oscar] always knew [It's Coming] would be a futuristic cityscape, so we just needed to choose the right forms and textures and light".

In terms of All I Could Do, "we wanted a completely abstract, cerebral landscape that needed to include a lot of contradicting emotions represented by visual motifs overlapping each other, without collapsing into a psychedelic soup".

The result is a kind of refined chaos: the combination of human forms interacting in Jalleh's synthetic worlds perfectly balancing Key Sung's spacious, electronic sound. Certainly no soup in sight.

As for his dream project?

"I'm moving more and more towards immersive environments, so anything that would completely take over the senses. Some kind of virtual reality, or something where you could actually physically move around the scenes I've created. That would be fantastic".