Ryan’s practice as a CGI artist all started from his obsession with glitch art, so he began messing around with creating digital artwork on photoshop. Since then, Ryan has progressed in his technical abilities, and he know creates masterpieces in the form of videography and moving image.

Ryan has collaborated with a number of artists that also work within the digital field including Ben Ditto and Jon Emmony. Vautier also collaborated on the music video for the The 1975, ‘The Birthday Party’, which if you haven’t seen already, encompasses all that is digital. Continue reading to hear from Ryan and his fantastical world of CGI.

Firstly, how did you get into the world of CGI?

I started practicing CGI to further my exploration of an obsession I had with ‘glitch art’. I loved messing around with anything digital, and I figured it was a natural progression. My laptop was so shitty at the time that I would screenshot any work, frame by frame, and edit it in a hack of photoshop I had. Eventually I bought an old PC of a mate for £100 (cheers Tom) and was finally able to actually render stuff out.

You say you ‘seek to explore information of evolution from the digital realm’, can you explain this in more detail?

Evolution exists everywhere and is hella cool. Watching a constant progression of a digital realm unfurl near real time is even cooler. The Digital realm is both real and fictitious. In one sense it’s literally a mode of transport that we currently use to share information, stories, cryptocurrency, photos of food, etc. However the information that I’m more interested in is a concept lying outside of that focus - a parallel dimension where what we know as digital is fact and the physical is fictitious. How would reality function there?

We currently see through lenses into that realm, and are able to see glimpses of what it is, and how it functions. We can then dissect and translate it into a physical understanding, and then re-enter it back into the digital.

Recently you have worked on ‘Pocket Machine’ for Rhumba Club, how did you create the visuals for this video from a technical perspective?

Pocket Machine was an incredible project to work on, and Rhumba Club are great to work with! The video was almost entirely done in Blender, a free open source software, and theres not much more too it than that! Mix that in with a bunch of 3D scans I’d taken and some long hours and layer it altogether and you have yourself a music video.

Tell us about a favourite project that you have worked on?

I recently had the amazing chance to work with the wonderful collective, Keiken and model, dancer and activist Sakeema Crook on a collaborative piece “We are at the end of something” which premiered at Mira.mov at Ideal Barcelona, as well as at FACT in Liverpool. Making this 30 minute piece, split across four twenty metre screens for Ideal was not only completely and utterly intense as hell, with round the clock working on CGI and on the spot decision making, but also insanely fun. The piece explores a whole plethora of concepts all swirling and mixed together, which consider the intersection of disparate events, human emotions and ideology in our post Covid-19 world. The film starts off in the security section of the ‘Metaport’, a subverted colossal airport where travellers can travel to different parts of the Metaverse. The characters are greeted by robotic security where several checks are carried out such as tongue temperature check with a lil gold popsicle stick. My favourite robot is this small one with little legs, that scuttles around, allowing you to pass or not. In this world all the characters have glass pregnant bellies, each carrying objects inside representing their inner beliefs. The film ends in Sakeema’s world where she invites us to embrace change, solidarity and compassion.

You collaborate with a selection of different creatives, do you believe collaboration is imperative to your practice as an individual artist?

Yep, essentially everyone is collaborating all the time anyway, so incorporating it into my practice seemed like a no-brainer! It also means I get the amazing opportunity to work with not only people I would have never otherwise worked with, but also enables me to push my boundaries beyond what I may have pushed them to myself. Working on projects with Jon Emmony, Theo Clinkard, and Keiken has been refreshing since each of them contains a completely different working style. Working with Theo especially was really unique as he comes from a strong dance background, so forming a strong narrative of AI/CGI throughout the piece was a completely different approach for something I would have normally done. Mariko-Montpetit who edited it totally brought it to life in a way I would have never imagined, and wouldn’t have got to experience if it wasn’t for collaboration!

You were head of CGI tech for the music video ‘The Birthday Party’ by The 1975, how did this opportunity arise for you?

I was working at a pub when I got accepted onto two internships at once. Classic waiting for a bus analogy, aside from the fact I accepted both internships, and kept working at the pub on the weekends. One of the internships was with Ben Ditto, and I ended up staying and working there a while on different projects, one of which was ‘The Birthday Party’. This was probably the longest project that I’ve worked on and it was pretty incredible working alongside Ben and Co-Director and digital artist Jon Emmony (who I fanboyed over when I realised I’d been saving their insta posts for inspiration).

What do you hope to achieve throughout 2021?

My partner @sarahblomey and I are working on a project which we will be slowly leaking bits across the year for a release towards the end of 2021! It’s been months in the pipeline and gone through intense concept stages, with many more to come! So that’s super exciting, and it’s incredible getting to work on a personal project of this scale too. Plus lockdowns making me stir crazy, so I’m very keen to go camping and scan every aspect of the forest so it never leaves my side.