Zawada, Smiling at the Camera
Australian artist Jonathan Zawada is renowned for multi-disciplinary work exploring technology’s complex interplay with human experience across painting, video, and installation. With roots in web design and coding, his practice seamlessly blends the artificial and natural in striking hyperreal visuals. Known for extensive collaborations with music artists like Flume, Mark Pritchard, and Thom Yorke, whose projects garnered ARIA recognition, Zawada exhibits internationally. His conceptually driven aesthetic, seen across fine art and commercial realms, acts as a compelling lens into the networks shaping contemporary existence, mirroring our intertwined realities.
Today, May 8, coinciding with the worldwide premiere of Tall Tales, we publish Pt 2 of this exclusive interview.
Tall Tales’ Psychedelic Code: A trippy tech-poetry
- Did you actively explore any new or emerging technologies (like AI or VR) during the creation of Tall Tales, and what was the impact on the final work?
- Can you point to a specific instance in Tall Tales where animation conveyed a crucial narrative element that a static image alone could not achieve?
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I had already been using generative AI before starting on Tall Tales in projects like videos for The Avalanches and Royksopp and it was naturally becoming part of my ideation and experimentation process. The interesting aspect to Tall Tales is how much the capability of AI and AI video evolved from the start to the finish of the project, going from a weird little thing that you couldn’t really produce anything final with to the kind of super realistic, temporally stable video generation that we have now. My approach to AI has always been largely one of treating it like one tool of many and where I’ve used it in Tall Tales it has been as a single layer amongst other processes. Interestingly one of the strongest and earliest conceptual basis for the work revolved around ideas of forgery and how we allocate value to art and while the place of AI in that discussion was present in my mind at the start its relevance increased to a degree I wouldn’t have predicted. There is a world where this whole project could have been just Blender animation, or just archival footage, or just AI but it’s the mixture of all of the different approaches that really speaks to the feelings of disorientation and complexity which are at the heart of the work.
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There is a song called Wandering Genie, which is the second last song in the film which consists solely of a layered descending vocal line which says “I am falling” and the video is a never ending zooming motion piece, made with an odd Stable Diffusion motion model where everything is constantly in motion and it feels like you are both falling and flying at the same time. I can’t imagine how an appropriate accompaniment to this song could have been made any other way – I actually tried so hard to think of an alternative. When Thom saw it he said “that’s mad, that’s exactly what I see when I hear the song”. In that instance I think its only animation that can achieve the effect of everything shifting all of the time which is emotionally at the heart of the music.
The Research Rabbit Hole Behind ‘Tall Tales’
- Tall Tales feels both ancient and futuristic. Could you discuss specific literary, cinematic, or musical works that directly influenced its unique worldbuilding?
- How consciously do elements from your personal history or environment, such as the Australian landscape, find their way into the aesthetic of Tall Tales?
- What does your research process typically involve when embarking on a project like Tall Tales? Do you delve into specific genres, archives, or other resources?
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There were so many stories and narratives from so many places that inspired different aspects of Tall Tales, from the real life story of the castaway Alexander Selkirk who was the original inspiration Robinson Crusoe, to the story of Sir Hector Monroe and the monument he had built on top of a hill in Scotland in order to give employment to the peasants who had previously worked the land but had been displaced by innovative agricultural practices. Something like Gangsters was inspired equally by the work of Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch as it was by MMOs like Red Dead Redemption Online and Fortnite or PUBG. In terms of emotional feeling, Mark and I spoke a lot about the kind of children’s shows that the BBC made in the 1970’s and 1980’s – which we got a lot of in Australia. There’s something dark and unnerving about those productions, even when they’re trying to be fun and optimistic, and that’s the feeling I remember even as a kid watching them. Shows like T-Bag where the main character is trapped in quest to escape from an alternate reality that is constantly changing shape and is all made on a very small sound stage with eerily flat studio lighting. Quite a few different books directly inspired aspects of the film too, one of the most important was Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole, which is a historical fiction piece that describes the events surround a gang of coin forgers in the 17th century in England and was both an inspiration for Thom’s lyrics and for many themes and visual motifs throughout Tall Tales. I’ve actually made a little zine briefly summarising many of the stories which we’ll be giving away at some of the film screenings.
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Both Mark and Thom being from the UK, and because a lot of the inspirational stories and narratives where UK based I feel like Tall Tales exists very much within that geography. There is a link in terms of Australia’s history as a British colony, in particular as a child growing up on the fairly distant and isolated Western Australian coast the stories I learned about various mutinies and people far away from their homes finding themselves in faraway lands.
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It feels a lot like unrolling sticky tape really. At the start it can be really hard to find the tiny corner that you can peel up and you’re picking away with your fingernail over and over until finally you get it and start to get a purchase on it. Once I have just the tiniest little idea or association to get started on I just largely follow wherever they lead. In the case of Tall Tales I had this story in mind from the very beginning, which is the story of the Thinker statue on the front cover which I had stumbled upon at least a decade ago while researching 3D scanning methods about a bronze Thinker statue which was stolen and had been cut up so that it could be melted down into copper, which was super valuable at the time because of the property boom in China. There is so much in a story like that, so many threads to pick up and follow which lead in all different directions. Ultimately there was no shortage of things like that in this project and I struggled really to figure out when to stop researching.
15 Years of Sonic Alchemy
- How did your initial collaboration with Mark Pritchard come about, and what was the shared vision that led to intertwining Tall Tales with his Under the Sun album?
- Thom Yorke’s contributions are often described as enigmatic. Can you elaborate on how his input specifically shaped the direction or mood of Tall Tales?
- What was your approach to translating the sonic textures of Mark Pritchard’s music or the emotional weight of Thom Yorke’s vocals into the visual realm of Tall Tales? Did the music directly influence visual elements like rhythm or texture?
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Mark and I were introduced about 15 years ago by an incredible guy called Dom who works at Warp Records. I immediately resonated with how Mark had freely explored a hugely wide variety of musical genres throughout his career, changing his name with almost every record he released. I’ve never felt like I had a real home within any part of the visual arts and have always enjoyed jumping around and trying different things too so we immediately bonded over that. I produced artwork for a number of different EPs for him and then eventually I worked on the art for his incredible Under the Sun album. One of the things that I think Mark appreciated in the work I did for Under the Sun was that I brought a lot of my own feelings about the music to it, that I didn’t try to pick up on his the references he had in the music but just instead responded to the music as a fellow human. We ended up producing a 16 minute 360 degree film piece for that and I think we both really enjoyed that process and were excited about the kinds of emotions and responses we could create in combining the music and visuals. Since then we’ve done some other installation art works as well as a VR film project and it felt inevitable that we would continue those explorations with Tall Tales.
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Everything Thom is involved with has a strong sense of his presence, in his voice and his lyrics. I think what always resonates is that they’re both cryptic and yet you empathise with them entirely. That kind of imprecise approach to making things is something that I think both Mark and I have also been attracted to, not putting a fine point on anything and leaving a lot of room for subjective interpretation in the work. The word that always comes up with Thom’s music is “anxiety” and I think that is probably the new element here. It’s a tricky emotion to express without words I think, I guess in that way it is a distinctly modern feeling. That feeling of anxiety really permeates a lot of this project too but it comes in ebbs and flows.
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Absolutely! Really my main aim at every point was just to visually express what was going on in the music, everything else acts in service to that. I think there can be a tendency in a lot of visuals for music for the visual world to demand too much of the viewer’s attention and in doing so it takes away from your experience of the music. I really always want to make sure that I’m creating space for the music to exists and for the viewer to be feeling the full scope of the sonic space. In this project I played around a lot with things like frame rate on different songs as well as different resolutions and degrees of fidelity, texture and detail in the imagery to help pick out those aspects in the music. Mark’s production work is so incredibly precise and considered that it would be impossible to do it justice without paying attention to those details. It’s incredible how the tiniest little jittering things can completely bring something to life or occasionally totally overtake and become too much visual noise. It was hard to find that balance in videos like Buggin Out, The Spirit or Wandering Genie.
The ‘White Cliffs’ Gamble That Won Over Thom Yorke
- Were there any instances during your collaborations where your visual ideas and the musicians’ sonic visions seemed to diverge? How did you navigate and resolve these creative tensions?
- Could you share a specific anecdote from your work with Mark Pritchard or Thom Yorke that you feel encapsulates the unique synergy (or perhaps friction) of your combined creative processes?
- How has the experience of collaborating with such distinct musical artists influenced your approach to future interdisciplinary projects?
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There really weren’t many divergences and I’m lucky in that both Mark and Thom ultimately deferred to me on the visual material and were happy to let me pursue whatever I felt was right. Having said that, wherever they had thoughts or concerns I took those pretty seriously and made changes where I thought they were warranted. Its a lovely thing having someone else who is a creative person reviewing your work, especially when they are a musician because the feedback never feels threatening in the way it might if it were coming from another visual artist. As an example, Thom didn’t quite think my choice of the main painting used in Fake in a Faker’s world was the right one and we had a decent chat about what I saw it as representing and what he saw it representing and what kinds of alternatives we could explore. His point was a valid one but ultimately the Rothko remained in place as Mark that beyond the conceptual arguments it just elicited a certain feeling which was right for the song. Being able to approach the work from a multitude of different artistic perspectives was really useful in that way.
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For me there were a couple of moments in the project where it felt like everything just came together in a perfect way. I think one of the videos I was most worried about was White Cliffs. It always felt like there was an opportunity to put a trick in there, or build on it in some way to make it feel “newer” in its approach but whenever I’d discuss that with Mark, although we thought there was an opportunity to do something we ultimately felt like we’d be sacrificing something of the simplicity of it that makes it work on a deeper level. I was very apprehensive about sharing it with Thom as I thought he was probably going to hate it but when we spoke to him about it I remember he said he normally wouldn’t like that kind of thing but in this case he felt like it totally worked. That kind of moment of finding that you share common ground with other people that you’re collaborating with, when you’re feeling very nervous about a direction that you’re taking that feels quite risky, that’s the kind of moment that I suppose you hope for in almost every project.
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I don’t think this has changed my trajectory too much if I’m honest. It really is the result of a pretty specific set of circumstances which I can’t imagine will arise any time again too soon (although there is another project I’m currently working on with an old collaborator which I’m very excited about). I think it has validated a lot of the feelings I’ve had about making work with musicians, about what I want to get out of those collaborations on a personal level, as well as what I think actually results in a project that benefits everyone. I suppose it has hardened me around the idea of doing things very much outside of a traditional film and video production framework, about treating these things as art pieces rather than marketing products and around taking chances and the benefits of simply putting in a lot of hard work.
Pictorial map of Robinson Crusoe Island, the “Island of Despair” — a remote isle near the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela.
Leaving the Island: The ‘Self-Contained’ Joy of a 5-Year Fantasy
- How do you typically introduce a project as visually unique as Tall Tales to audiences who might be unfamiliar with your previous work?
- Do you envision Tall Tales potentially expanding into other formats, such as a feature film, an interactive experience, or a VR project?
- Looking ahead, are there further episodes or developments planned for Tall Tales, or do you consider this particular project complete?
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Happily I haven’t had to introduce it to anyone yet! Its a very hard thing to describe and I have difficult time finding inroads into explaining what it is and where I’m coming from. I think the most useful analogy I’ve had is that it feels as much like entering a museum where each room is an installation piece, rather than a film in any traditional sense.
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We actually developed almost all of the ideas from the film into installation concepts for physical galleries but I don’t think we’ll ever get the chance to realise any of them. One of the main things we learned on working on this is that its quite hard to get anyone to commit the kinds of resources and energy required to pull things off and so it’s probably best that we just rely on ourselves to realise the ideas.
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I can’t speak for Mark and Thom, and on a purely selfish level, as a fan of the music I’d love it if they made more but I think from where I stand it feels like Tall Tales is complete. It has been nice to have made something that feels self contained in that way, which is actually quite rare in working on music projects which often spiral out into various iterations and evolutions. After 5 years, I’m quite happy to be leaving the island!
*Get much more info and inspiration from this delightful interview in Pt 1 <<