Dyan Jong makes gifs professionally among other things. When I ask the 29-year-old visual and installation artist what gifs can transmit that other mediums can't, her answer is concise but complete: “Eternity.”
It wasn’t long ago that gifs were bi-products of longer stories. Now the democratized short stories dictate the cadence of music videos and carve eternal moments into our collective imagination. For her gifs Dyan manipulates light to create movement. “I’ve spend a lot of time figuring out a natural rhythm for gifs so I ended up using a lot of light gimmicks.” she told me over the phone. In some of the gifs she’s created, her subject matters, often musicians and models, stay still while the light carries on a full day’s worth of movement. Light is in fact a theme across Dyan’s work as a photographer, director and installation artist. Last year, she presented “Resilience”, a large-scale installation in Los Angeles’ Chinatown where 8000 beams each representing one hundred of the estimated 800,000 Dreamers enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as of 2017 filtered through holes in a makeshift wall.
Growing up in Temple City, a suburb east of Los Angeles, Dyan was more interested in the anime and manga she and her sister devoured over the summer and the virtual-world science games she spent hours on than school. “I don’t really have that many formative memories of school. That’s the reason why I ended up in my own head.” By the time she was ten, she already had a website she built using the computer her dad had assembled for her. A true child of the internet who has seen digital possibilities amplify, it’s no wonder Dyan is herself interested in stretching and distorting those limits through image and space.
Director: Frances Capell Producer: Burning Film / Ryland Burns Executive Producers: Rob Stone, Jon Cohen, Andy Cohn, Anthony Holland Creative Director: Scott Perry Director of Photography: Mikey Van Beuren Assistant Camera: Loren Hamilton Sound Recordist: Jake Viator Production Manager: Madison LaClair Associate Producer: Claire Lilly Production Assistants: Lindsey Hartman, Tyler Evans Editor: Andrew Sales Titles: Louis-Philippe Riel Animation: Nik Shah Color: Dimitri Rajapakse at MPCLA Sound Mix: Jake Viator
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