Talent Crush: Saad Moosajee
It’s been a minute. Full disclosure: the more I interview artists, the harder it gets to find the right pick. With an overabundance of information out there, there’s no shortage of digital content to entertain the audience. Yet, here I am, digging for months and months. Saad Moosajee is an artist with a capital A, a digital wanderer, but, as we all know, not all who wander are lost. Moosajee’s dreamlike worlds have been long-time admired by visionaries like Thom Yorke, Sampha, and Woodkid, just to name a few. That said, Saad mentioned that he’s been turning down most interviews lately, yet he felt that personal touch on METAL & DVST and decided it could potentially turn into something special – that alone speaks volumes about Moosajee and his creative philosophy. When asked about what he would like the audience to take away from his work, Saad’s response was curiosity, which is the most generous gift there is: the curiosity and excitement to learn. The rest will figure itself out.
KELLY KORZUN: Bjork once said: “I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic music has no soul. You can’t blame the computer. If there’s no soul in the music, it’s because nobody put it there.” Today, music video production is recognized as an art form, but I remember that time in early 2000s when it all started with the Directors Label series, which pushed the needle in that direction. What’s your take on finding the right balance between soul and technology?
SAAD MOOSAJEE: What I always loved about digital tools was that they opened an entirely new world of possibilities for people who may not have had access otherwise. Because I discovered computer animation and digital art young, I always treated my computer analogous to a pencil. I saw the magic in the technology, how the ease of access and limitlessness could allow a kid sitting in his bedroom to create something just as vivid as the big budget productions out there. That sense of possibility had me hooked – it changed the way I looked at almost everything. I went from questioning why my favorite album covers and films weren’t in the museums to believing that I needed to spend all my time helping to put them there. It was later on that I discovered things like the Directors Label Boxset and the Bjork videos like Mutual Core and All Is Full of Love, which broke artworld and animation barriers. You could feel the spirit and magic in those works, the dreamer mentality effect. Individuals with a vision locked up in a room, using tools and approaches previously only accessible to hugely funded studios. Decades later, those works still look amazing and their soul can still be felt because of the perfect balance between the humanity and technology. In my own work, I found that no matter how digital it was, I always tried to incorporate a level of humanity into everything I made, whether through a production process that was rooted in something innately human, or through a personal investment of my actual self. It was the push and pull between the real and the surreal – being able to watch something unseen while also being able to feel the emotions and touch of the person behind it – that’s what I’ve always been interested in.
KK: Given the diversity of my own background, I’ve always been interested in exploring the facets of human identity, which is why Hermann Hesse’s obsession with that topic has always resonated with me: “We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.” You were born in the UK, but grew up in Colorado, with none of your immediate surroundings being in any type of creative career. Besides turning to digital art communities (DeviantArt, OFFF, Tumblr), what helped you feel more integrated back then, and how important is it for you to represent your heritage in the creative community today?
SM: When I was a kid, I would get lost everywhere I went. In Colorado, my mother would drive my brother and I to school every day, but it took me years to learn the route because when I looked out the car window, I could only watch the images in my head instead of the road. We were immigrants from countries most of the people around us had never heard of – my father is Sri Lankan, while my mother is Pakistani. Both my parents are muslim, and grew up across multiple countries away from where they were born. When people would ask me where I was from, I’d answer I’m Pakistani-Sri Lankan, born in England, and now living in Colorado. Instinctively, I preferred to be overelaborate rather than giving a simplified answer. I wasn’t really sure what my home or my truth was, but I made sure to keep it on my own terms. When I went back to my old bedroom last year, I realized that it was actually my first studio. By the time I entered high school, my closet was filled with canvas prints of my work and a book I’d designed to show the progression of what I’d made. My childhood had been a lot of soccer and traveling, but once I put together that book, making art was all I could think about. I gravitated towards the digital art communities because it felt like a bunch of kids forming spaces around their creative development, pushing each other to be better. Most of the people around me spent their time in the Rocky Mountains, at school, at concerts, and I spent my time creating work and sharing it with artists senior to me to get critique so that I could improve. Even though I was always the youngest member in the online community, everyone I met, all these strangers from across the globe who would later go on to become incredible artists, showed me constant support. It gave me the belief that I’d be able to build what I needed later on, which is why I always keep Virgil Abloh’s quote “Everything I do is for the 17-year-old version of myself” close in my thoughts.
KK: Diverse cultural background oftentimes results in a pretty eclectic music taste. How do you think that taste evolved over the years, and what potential collaborations in music do you find most exciting at this point of your life?
SM: My taste in music often mirrors my taste in images. It’s expansive, but the same qualities and themes are present – a sense of emotion and poetry, of authentic storytelling, of cinematic soundscapes. I’ve recently been more interested in the way a song is built up through many layers, like an image, and am always on the lookout for pieces that live within a type of future classic, merging elements of the old and the new. Most of the video projects I’m known for were done for songs that already existed, creating the images to match the music. It’s interesting because people are often curious what artists I’d want to collaborate with in the future, but in almost all of my projects, the collaboration occurred because something I’d made resonated with the musician and they reached out. The best example is probably Woodkid – I actually hadn’t heard of him before he messaged me, then I listened to his music and felt like I could understand parts of my own work differently. So I started to look to the universe to answer that question, putting my focus entirely on trying to put work out that I’m connected to and trusting that the right people will see it. Going forward, I’m definitely excited to try and close the loop further between sound and image, working on projects where visuals and audio are developed alongside each other with the same level of intensity.
KK: There’s this quote by Georges Mathieu, father of the Lyrical Abstraction, who was also one of the first artists to bring together painting and performance art: “In lyrical abstraction, the canvas becomes a space of freedom where the artist can experience his deepest emotions without constraint.” Creating visuals and audio in a synchronized way is definitely a new dimension we’re just starting to explore.
SM: Yes, I think those collaborations will likely push into other formats and genres beyond music videos. Before I did videos, I actually designed album covers – for me it was never about being a music video director, but rather chasing that goosebumps feeling I got from the movies and records in my childhood.
KK: Let’s talk about Sampha’s Can’t Go Back for a moment, a song that speaks about breaking old patterns in order to move forward in life. To me, it’s also a story about growth and acceptance; the realization that sometimes moving at a slower pace may actually result in accelerating, although it’s counterintuitive. From a visual standpoint, there’s a lot of room for exploration because it can be portrayed through a very specific and detailed storyline, or it can be quite abstract and open to interpretation, which is the route you ultimately chose. What did the ideation process for this video look like, and what personal experiences helped you to connect to this track on the emotional level?
SM: The ideation process began with conversations around the meaning of the track, which I then used as a springboard to create written treatments and original concept art. Something that grabbed me in those early conversations was the way Sampha described our minds as time machines – the idea that both our memories and our dreams move us backwards and forwards. He had gravitated towards the dreamlike feeling in my work, a quality I feel is the result of how much time I spend researching the old and imagining the new, so it felt right to anchor the video in a concept like this. I channeled everything from classic surrealist cinema to Afrofuturist literature, opting for a vignette-based approach that intercut between the two directions of time.
KK: In 2019, you co-directed Last I Heard, a black and white video made from fragments of Thom Yorke’s imagination, while combining charcoal painting, crowd simulation, 3D animation and stop-motion photography across 3000 hand-treated frames. How did this collaboration come about and to what extent was Thom involved in the process?
SM: Thom’s initial brief was based around feelings of anxiety within a city inspired by London, alongside illustrations from collaborator Stanley Donwood. He also shared an extensive typewriter list of fragmented poems he’d written while making the album. I remember reading this long list and feeling like the whole video was already there because of how visually stimulating these fragments were. It was clear he was coming at it from a very personal place through the lens of repetitive stream of consciousness with recurring ideas and themes, many of which appear in his older videos, including Paul Thomas Anderson’s Anima, the other film commissioned for the release. One line that grabbed me early on was HUGE CROWDS OF PEOPLE ALL GOING ONE WAY AND YOU'RE GOING THE OTHER WAY BUT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. It’s the type of thing you could easily brush over, but when paired with the music, it produced that type of fragmented dream in my mind while also evoking a strong emotion. A lot of the project was me at a desk, taking out that list and freely creating from it without storyboards, without a plan – trying to fill in the gaps. I’d spend every day visualizing these dream sequences from Thom, which I myself then started to dream of. It was a very raw process, a marathon where everyone working on the project was living in the world we were creating. Our production team was around ten people total, which for the ambition of what we were doing – delivering 5:15 minutes of animation made up by over 3,000 frames in 3 months – was actually quite small. We were working on more scenes than we had capacity for, which organically led me to working as both a director and a lead production artist.
KK: Symbolism is a big part of your visual DNA. Where do you think the inspiration for these visions stem from? Over the years, have you spotted any patterns or common themes in the way you play with symbols in your work?
SM: When it comes to creative DNA, I’d say the surrealist movement and magic realism are two big components of mine, and I feel like the symbols in my work are me processing emotions, thoughts, dreams – deconstructing and reconstructing what’s around me while I look for a moment of magic. It’s a way to work through where abstraction meets reality. Sometimes I see an image and it just stays with me for years on end, only to be reprocessed later as a symbol in my work. I think Dali described the feeling best: “Open the gates to the irrational. Accept only those images which make a great impact without attempting to discover why.”
KK: Another common theme that I’ve noticed in your body of work is that many of the characters you made are very abstract, oftentimes faceless, which makes the audience wonder who these creatures are and what’s their backstory to assemble a puzzle. The audience is given a powerful tool to complete the narrative based on their own lived experiences, and that tool is imagination, which ultimately turns them into active participants: now, they are the creators, they are the artists. I think one of the things that makes you a great visual storyteller and communicator is the fact that you spent some time in isolation when perfecting your craft at the very beginning of your career – you seem to have this urge to connect to people, even if subconsciously. Despite having access to all the technology in the world to stay connected today, many studies have shown that people feel more disconnected than ever. What’s your take on that and how do you make sure you stay connected to the environment around you while also working in a digital space in one of the busiest cities in the world?
SM: Something that has helped me stay connected is guarding myself against the speed and demand of the industry. That may mean weeks or months of late nights inside the studio only to step back, put what I’ve made on the shelf and rest. Those periods of rest can be an hour, a day, a week, a month – I try not to overthink it. I’m usually walking as much as I can, not trying to go anywhere, but letting myself wander instead. It’s things like sprinting on the grass with a ball, or when I’m in the ocean in Sri Lanka when I feel most connected to the environment around me. Living in NYC is interesting because I often feel myself becoming disconnected from my surroundings, especially in the pandemic. Today, the level of interconnectedness is incredible, but it can become overstimulating. I’ve watched myself try to perfect an image only to realize I overworked it and it was better 15 versions earlier. Technology helps us move faster, enabling us to explore many more creative impulses and achieve things that previously may have been slow, but not all slowness is bad. The space to step away and slowly ask WHY is what allows me to channel obsession into something tangible.
KK: Exactly, but I think this sense of refinement comes with experience and practice. Whenever I’m making art, I first invite my inner kid to play and experiment as freely as possible, but when finalizing it digitally, the adult in me takes charge by revisiting every single layer and questioning if it needs to stay or go, or if it can be executed better.
SM: I believe a lot in the decisive moment during the process of making (Henri Cartier Bresson is one of my favorite photographers) and that the limitations of the physical world and processes are what makes something human. The digital workflows allow for endless iterations cycles, but the most important way I use them is to continuously give myself options until intuition shows me the right moment. It’s the same way you feel when you sit down and eat a dish you struggle to describe. You know it’s not the first time they cooked that.
KK: Limitation always breeds creativity. During the pandemic, you directed 777, an Apple Music exclusive video, where all the characters were brought to life by only one performer, Maya Man, combined with motion capture technology. Did these limitations you had to encounter during that time lead to any interesting outputs or techniques you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise?
SM: The project started out with me creating these very dense figurative compositions reminiscent of European classical paintings. Whereas typically in the video concept phase I would think in motion, I deliberately made everything static in this case. I put my focus entirely towards understanding Caravaggio, Jan van Eyck, Gustave Doré, and did not think at all how I could achieve any of it in video. As a result, I turned off a lot of what normally makes something 3D in the software and, instead, just focused on making a painting. This restricted CG approach lead me to not only the motion capture technique you just described, but also to other discoveries in digital lighting and crowd simulation, which I ended up being invited to write an academic paper on for SIGGRAPH.
KK: You graduated from and taught at RISD, and you are currently an adjunct teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York. What made you embark on that journey, and what were the biggest wins and challenges you can recall as an educator?
SM: When I left school and started working in the industry, I found I missed the creative discourse and curiosity of an academic environment. I thought about grad school, but was too eager to pursue my professional projects. Instead, I started teaching and ended up using course writing as a way to fuel my own research. I liked the feedback loop of teaching my students and pushing them to evolve, while pushing myself to learn more to discover new things to teach. The biggest win from teaching was the long-term collaborations I formed with my students, many of whom went on to work as artists on my videos. I came to understand about myself that I was most natural in the mentality of the student mind. Doing something different that would allow me to learn a new skill or perspective always took precedence over everything else. The idea of sharing your creative hunger with your peers, critiquing and learning from each other’s work – I don’t think that should only exist in art school. Since I had this mentality before I ever studied anything, it wasn’t so much a phase of life for me, but more of a way of life. Sometimes you read a quote that feels like someone wrote the words you’d been thinking, but couldn’t quite articulate. There’s one from Eiko Ishioka, an art director I’m very inspired by, that I would share with students every year: “For me, it’s important to never follow what’s in fashion. I don’t want to imitate others. I managed to survive by expressing what I want to do. Designers are the same as athletes, so I have to train myself exhaustively; that’s how I think about it. If you can’t create something original, you can’t survive.”
