the-art-of-animated-gifs - Tumblr blog

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 2 years

Text

Note to readers:

I have not abandoned this blog but I am now focusing my efforts writing about Motion Art in the new publication about NFTs art called UNDRGRND.

I had planned to repost my articles here but I have not found time to do that work and so instead will post links to what I have written so far.

I am being paid a small amount so you can surely understand how I could prioritize that for now at least. UNDRGRND is a very good publication and you can learn about interesting NFT artists and trends if you follow it as well as read my pieces when they first come out. I do appreciate the support I have received for my writing of this blog in Tumblr over the years and will keep it alive, at least for reposting articles I write in UNDRGRND. Who knows what the future may bring.

Anyone who ever wants to reach out to me for any reason can always DM me on twitter https://twitter.com/dkoblesky

--------------------------------

https://undrgrnd.io/undrgrnd/motion-journal-hyojung-seo

-------------------------------------------------------------

https://undrgrnd.io/undrgrnd/motion-journal-hoxid

-------------------------------------------------------------

https://undrgrnd.io/undrgrnd/motion-journal-haydiroket

-------------------------------------------------------------

https://undrgrnd.io/undrgrnd/motion-journal-anderson-koya

-------------------------------------------------------------

https://undrgrnd.io/undrgrnd/motion-journal-lorna-mills

-------------------------------------------------------------

https://undrgrnd.io/undrgrnd/motion-journal-loackme

-------------------------------------------------------------

https://undrgrnd.io/undrgrnd/motion-art-a-new-aesthetic

#gif aesthetic #motion art #nftart

18 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 2 years

Video

I Love Molly Fairhurst

I have been wanting to write about Molly Fairhurst for a long time. Molly Fairhurst is an established illustrator and animator based in Bristol UK. Her work does not *quite* fit the category of short form motion I typically write about but for this latest piece I decided to throw caution to the wind. It is just 30 seconds and is shows Nov 6 at the Out the Window exhibition in Bristol UK.

I love her work because of how simple and yet how perfectly calculated it is. All of her drawings are made by hand and they always looks adorable and clever and a bit messy but every single line and blot and color is carefully considered. She is extremely judicious about the use of color. Every seeming mistake is in there because she realizes it adds to the overall feel. Because of this every single thing she does feels like Molly Fairhurst. This is what an artist looks like.

In that past year I have noticed her doing more and more animation and her approach to it is exactly the same. Every bit of animation, seemingly simplistic, is carefully considered - there is not a wasted frame. The movement all works perfectly with her style of drawing. Everything is always moving, pulsing, in a gentle way. It feels alive. The work is perfectly timed. No extras, no obvious looping to extend things. As I said before, despite her seemingly casual handmade style she is an great editor of her own work.

I admire how she has made the animation of her illustrations an extension of her style. She doesn’t just move her drawings around as some illustrators trying to get into animation do. They are fully part of her art.

Her little animation of last Christmas ‘Snowboy Star and Seekan’ was a beautiful and perfect heartbreakingly sweet, and short, motion poem. With a perfect soundtrack.

The piece I have posted is pure Molly Fairhurst. Adorable, sweet, hand made messy in a blue and off white palette - and perfect.

One last thing I will say about Molly Fairhurst is that she is a thoroughly modern artist. She is an online artist. She posts to her Instagram, both stories and artwork, many many times a day. If you follow her you feel that she is part of your life because so much of herself is online. And yet most all of her work is all made by hand with ink and brushes and paper.

I have friends who make art by hand who still feel that somehow crossing into online art is a huge leap. Molly Fairhurst is an example that that this is not the case. It is all a continuum. Our digital and irl lives can overlap and be one life.

------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#illustration #animation #gif aesthetic

16 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 2 years

Video

Frederick Vanhoutte’s Beautiful Generative Dragonflies

I recently wrote about Frederick Vanhoutte and his beautiful spontaneous beach animation. Whether that nudged him back into doing more motion work or was simply a preview of ideas he was already developing I do not know, but I just saw this wonderful series of animations he posted on Instagram and had to write a little bit about it (make sure to watch all 4).

These pieces are definitely in the motion style that he has worked with in the past but they are also new in the way they are presented and colored. The same geometrical unfolding and rotating and folding is happening but with a wonderful spectrum of colors that are also mirrored in some way that make them appear like a beautiful generative insect (I think of a dragonfly) slowly unfurling and closing its coded wings.

It is like a nature study. Nature is based on math (according to many scientists) and Frederick is literally using math to create these studies, so there is a connection since it is all part of the continuum of the natural world. You could almost say it is as much of a nature study as someone doing a hyperrealistic 3D render of a dragonfly - except this is much more interesting I think. A work like this creates a bridge between what we see in nature and the code we are using today to digitize the world. But this work is native to its environment, so in a sense more honest, more direct.

In the end, I just think these are beautiful. I love the choice of colors and I love the snapping movements, which remind me that this is made with code that has an specific type of ease in calculating the way it moves into place.

Welcome back to motion Frederick.

------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#processing #Code Art

11 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Video

Carlo Vega: Motion Painter

Carlo Vega has a wonderful inspiring backstory that starts in Lima, Peru, goes through Montreal and South Carolina and winds up in Brooklyn, where he has been doing high quality Motion Design for 20 years under the banner of Clyde Fox

But Carlo Vega is a new breed of artist: A Motion Painter

He thinks in motion, and his recent series, ‘Minimal’ is a great example of this. All of the pieces are abstract, and done with simple geometric shapes in black and white and shades of gray. Everything is moving all the time in different combinations and with different speeds and transparency and action. But each piece is short and compact and loops and contains just a handful of elements. There is no narrative. In some, triangles and arrows and rectangles dominate and in others circles and arc and radial lines dominate. The pace of each piece is different; some are fast, some are slow. Some are elegant and silky and some are hyper and jumpy. It is impossible to make a still and understand what the work is, because the work IS the motion + the elements. So you have to watch it a few times to understand what he is doing and what each piece is.

Also, according to Carlo, these are made primarily in After Effects, but with some additional scripting. So they are a hybrid of code and timeline based animation. These days the assumption is that anything that looks like this would be made in code, usually with processing. I am looking forward to a time when the tool that the artist uses to create their work in does not automatically classify them into a tool specific niche that then includes them into exhibitions and overviews and articles and so on. Forget the tool.....what about the art?

Carlos’s elegant work is best seen on his Instagram but see here for a link tree to the various parts of his work.

------------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#gif aesthetic #gif animation #abstract animation

16 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Video

From the beach, a beautiful work from Frederik Vanhoutte

I saw this come through on Instagram from Frederik Vanhoutte and was immediately knocked off my chair. It is beautiful, mesmerizing, perfect.

I have know Frederik for a long time. I featured his work a couple of years ago in Cross Connect (pre-NFT!) when I was motion art curator there. And over the years I have chatted with him on Twitter and seen him develop into a force on hic et nunc in the NFT space.

He has not done a lot of animation of late (that I am aware of). But Frederik is a hard core artist, and when he wants to do something with motion it is going to be really interesting.

For this work he appears to be at the beach having vacation, because the Instagram still before and after show the beach. But, as artists do, he found a way to make a little masterpiece just shooting video at the beach.

He did it in a rigidly formatted way, as is his style, but with variations. The rigidly formatted square format enhances the mesmerizing quality of the waves moving in and out and creates beautiful patterns. It is, to my mind, perfect.

When artists practice their craft as often as Frederik does, a work like this can just spring out of the air because it is as if it is in their muscle memory. So, from the beach, Frederik sends this little gem for us to enjoy.

------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#procssing #Code Art

49 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Photo

The Art of XCOPY

For anyone not in the NFT world know this: XCOPY is one of the most famous of all NFT artists. XCOPY has sold millions of dollars of work and is truly an icon because the work is almost always instantly recognizable as XCOPY. As I was thinking about Motion Art recently I realized that XCOPY was a great example of the ideas about motion and gif art that I have been writing about here for the past three years.

So what is is that makes XCOPY’s work special?

The answer lies in two parts: The illustration + the motion.

And these two parts are truly equal. XCOPY is an excellent illustrator and on the strength of that alone the work is good. The rough edged simplistic shapes with minimal colors and glitch elements, almost always on black, is striking. The amount of detail is always just right - a perfect balance between representation and abstraction.

But where XCOPY becomes XCOPY is in the motion. XCOPY varies key elements of the initial drawing over time to where it becomes something new, something with great energy that feels alive.

The motion is simple, just a few frames, but there is great restraint and aesthetic judgment there, and I am sure much trial and error goes into making the final decision about which few frames compose the final. You can feel that because when you look that the work together you can feel the consistency of the motion. Animators have many choices for how to vary what they do from frame to frame. And these decisions are what transforms a once static image into an XCOPY, something new.

You can easily see this if you are looking through XCOPY’s work and come across a rare static work. It feels completely different. It feels kind of...dead. What make XCOPY unique is the illustration + the motion.

This is why I say this is a new aesthetic that is only possible because we all now view art on a screen with a computer behind it.

And there is a great history behind it because the work of XCOPY is a pure representation of gif based motion art, which goes back to the glory days of Tumblr and the period of 2009-2014 when many great gif artists were developing their work. Beeple came out of this period also, but what is different about Beeple is that his work is primarily static while the work of XCOPY is based in motion.

You could have a gallery exhibit of Beeple’s work as high res prints but this would never make sense for XCOPY. The work would have to be displayed in motion.

--------------------------------------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#gif aesthetic #glitch aesthetic #looping gif

76 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Video

Andreas Karaoulanis: The innocent joy of spontaneous messing around

Andreas Karaoulanis has been making some joyful animations that you can see, and buy, on hic et nunc. The piece above, which he calls ‘Kinikilig’ is a great example of what he is doing. But there are many others.*

Andreas Karaoulanis is a veteran animator as you can see in his CV, and I can tell by looking at his work. He uses After Effects, and his command of the tool is such that these works, which are complex and made of many layers with many different speeds and effects, are simply him 'messing around’. This is what comes out of knowing a tool for years. It becomes part of you and you can use the tool effortlessly, the way an experienced musician plays their instrument.

These works are similar in a general way to Helena Sarin’s recent work which I wrote about a few posts back. They are motion paintings that feel somewhat in the vein of Abstract Expressionism and/or Collage. They are rough and look hand made (more on that below) and are grounded in one basic visual layout, which is animated. But there is not ‘one’ visual layout. Because this is motion art, it is all fluid and there is no beginning and no end. They are short, maybe 10-15 seconds, and the work is what unfolds over time as you watch it. But it has the characteristic of a painting in the sense of there being one coherent set of imagery that changes. Making a still gives you no sense of what the art really is.

How this one coherent set of motion imagery is determined is a spontaneous decision making process by the artist. I am sure that when Jackson Pollock started to throw paint around he had an idea of what he wanted to do, but in the act of doing it new ideas emerged and in the end it became something new. That is what this work feels like: Andreas adds a shape, then another, the another, then animates them a bit, changing it, adding another shape, etc. In then end when he felt at one moment that is was right.

This has nothing to do with narrative. It has to do with what feels right in those 10-15 seconds and how the motion and imagery work together. Andreas is a pure instinctual animator in the way he creates the motion. Things appear and disappear and move a little bit here and a little bit there, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes jagged. In the end it all feels right. And it is enjoyable to watch for as many times as you want...3, 4, 7, 10, who is counting? And since there is no beginning and end who can tell? It just is there moving in front of you.

I love the rough quality of the imagery. It looks hand drawn, but I am guessing he just created it all inside of After Effects. After Effects is a deep tool and all this imagery can easily be created inside of it. That is part of what makes it spontaneous.....he did not need to draw something on paper and then scan it and import it and so on, which can be slow and tedious and prevent the kind of ‘messing around’ that Andreas mentions on the title of his hic page.

Seeing work like this makes me feel that I am seeing what someone like Joseph Cornell or Man Ray or Robert Motherwell or Jasper Johns or whoever would have made if they had After Effects. Or not. Because they were static artists, and Andreas Karaoulanis is a new kind of artist, a Motion Artist. An artist who thinks in motion.

*Andreas makes them as gifs, which is great, but Tumblr has a 5mb file size limitation and these are far too big, so I needed to convert it to an .mp4

----------------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#abstract expressionism #collage #gif aesthetic

13 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Video

Xenoself made a perfect, funny gif

I have been following Eric Scrivener, aka xenoself, for years. He is an artist in the tumblr gif tradition, with gifs going back to 2010, an OG of that genre, as A.L. Crego might say - and you can see his work best represented in his tumblr. However, I saw this on his IG page while drinking my coffee and it made me laugh out loud. A perfect gif.

I am not going to dissect it anymore than to say check out Eric’s work - you will find other gems like this there.

-----------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#gif aesthetic #funny gifs

4 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Video

Helena Sarin: Abstract Expressionist Animation

Helen Sarin has been creating some very interesting animations using the GAN toolset (the one above is on her Instagram page). It is as if she is channelling the work of classic Abstract Expressionists like Franz Kline or Clyfford Styl - but with motion. The large strokes that vibrate and change shape abruptly a few times while still retaining their basic black and red forms seems like a 1950s painting come to life. The two kinds of motion work well together and are very enjoyable to watch. If you were to look at a still of an Abstract Expressionist painting, how would you imagine it would move? To me, what Helena Sarin creates feels right. The energy is abrupt and twitchy. But it does not overwhelm you and you do not get tired of watching it. The basic shapes and colors stay the same. The motion conveys a tone, and energy, that matches the visual.

Helena Sarin is a well known code artist who famously uses the GAN toolset, which seem to really becoming quite widespread now. At least I am seeing a lot of it on my feeds. Forgive me for saying this, but it feels a little bit like the moment when morphing became popular in the early 1990s (yes I am old enough to remember that). Everyone used it for everything and then it was overused and it disappeared from sight. After all, it was just a tool. But GAN, in the hands of artists like Helena Sarin and Holly Herndon and Ivona Tau can help create beautiful motion work. In the end it is the aesthetic decisions made by the artists that create the work, even if it is training a computer network to make something for you.

-----------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#Ai art #gan #abstract expressionism

10 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Video

Dimitri Thouzery: Glitch Landscape

Dmitri Thouzery is a self described ‘new media artist’ who lives in Toulouse, France. He says ‘I have done a wide variety of project, music clip, vjing, interactive and immersive installations, building mapping, branding, live data visualisations, touchdesigner workshops’. He sells his work on hic et nunc but you can find some different and really spectacular things on his Instagram page, which is where I saw the work above.

I love this work. It is rooted in a landscape in which you have your visual bearings the entire time; a flat plane and shapes perpendicular to it that come and go in mostly the same glitchy and twitchy way. Everything is changing constantly but the landscape and perpendicular shapes remain constant and the camera is making a very slow rotation around the entire thing to the point where what you are seeing is upside down. But because the piece is rooted in those two concepts you never feel that it is out of control and you can enjoy the glitch building like shapes coming and going and the landscape constantly changing. It almost feels like an environment you could be inside of, a little glitchy world. The fact that it is in black and white also helps keep it rooted.

Glitch art, like abstract expressionism or other pure abstract artwork, can feel chaotic and unmoored unless the artist has a control and logic for the parts that make it up. Balancing the chaos with some kind of order. In this case, Dmitri Thouzery definitely does have control and as a viewer you can watch it multiple times with pleasure.

Take a look at some of his other work and see more examples like this, especially on his Instagram page

------------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#glitch aesthetic #touchdesigner

15 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Text

Live discussion about curation

Today at 12ET I will be part of a conversation hosted by the very energetic Micol at Vertical Crypto Art. She was generous enough to re-post my piece about curation and is going to base at least the beginning of the discussion today on it. See her call below for participants. Should be an interesting conversation. Join if you are able!

------------------------------------

For this weeks @TwitterSpaces on Friday at 12PM ET it would be great to continue on the theme started by @dkoblesky on "what curations means to..." Who would like to jump in and speak about this?

0 notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Text

What Curation Means to Me

Last week I was lucky enough to be invited to the Twitter Chat ‘Curation in the NFT Space’ from Vertical Crypto Art (@verticalcrypto). The conversation was wonderful, but revealed to me that people view curation in very different ways. So I have decided to write what it means to ME. I am not going to pretend to know what the textbook definition is, and I know that there are going to be various ways to see it. This is my opinion.

Loving the Art

To me curation starts with loving a particular kind of art. Even salaried Museum curators of many years I am sure love the subject that they work with and curate. Otherwise, why are they there?

I love short motion art, or animated gifs. So that is what I curate. You can read this blog for more nuance about what that means, but I do not write about anything that does not move. If a piece is longer than around 60 seconds or gets into narrative territory, I do not write about it.

So I think maybe part of curation is defining what it is you are curating. You need to define it for yourself at least, but it is helpful to able to explain it to someone, and possibly even write about it. I do this all the time. Again, this is just me.

Writing about specific Artwork

The heart of curation, in my opinion, is writing in my own way why I think specific art is great. I limit myself to a particular piece or perhaps a few related pieces. This is important I think.

Artists can create all kinds of art across the span of their career. Sometimes they do very different things at very different times. So for me it not a profile of an artist, it is a profile of a particular work or series of works that have a similar aesthetic.

I imagine having a conversation with someone and telling them why I think this particular art is great. They may disagree, but it is important that I clearly state what it is I love about it. It does not have to include the artists history, the technology used, the time it was made, or any other details. Just that work, or works, and how I react to them.

And I think it needs to be written down. Because as a curator you will be communicating with people online who will need to understand you. You could make a video of yourself saying it, but I like writing it down.

I do not write a lot, usually write a few sentences, maybe a couple of paragraphs. Hard core museum curators of course can write much much more about a particular work of art. But a few sentences is hard enough, and I think long enough to enable you to express what you think.

To me, collecting and buying are not Curating

Some people feel that simply liking or collecting things is curation. They will say this: If a person buys certain artworks or likes certain things, isn’t that someone organizing art in a formal way and isn’t that the same as curation?

To me it is not curation. That is liking and collecting. Curating, to me, goes a step further and involves some explanation for why you think particular artwork is great. I think curation means putting in the work to explain why you think it is great.

Adding details is helpful, but not the main thing

In addition to writing about the work, I always add some details about the artist. Who they are, where they are from, maybe some details about their techniques. This is important for the artist and the reader. It does not have to be a lot.

I never feel that I need to really understand the technology or the history of what they are doing. I am not a coder but I have written a lot a out coder artists. I feel that I am qualified to say whether I think some code art is good with knowing Processing. And I do not think I need to know the entire history of a particular artist who may have been doing work for a long time to say what I think about a particular piece.

I sometimes take issue with serious art journals that write about art and seem to only include history or intention or technology details, as if that in and of itself makes the art good. Just because someone made something with photos of 100,000 marbles run through an AI program that relates to a historical event does not mean it is good art (I just made that up as an example).

I don’t think Curation is the same as criticism

Art critics look at work and say whether they are successful of not, and they say negative things about some artwork. That is a particular thing that is different that curation in my opinion. As I said above, Curation starts, at least for me, from a standpoint of love and positivity. I do not feel it is my role to say whether something is good or not. The act of my curating it means I think it is good.

I don’t think interviews with Artists is Curation

Interviews with artists are wonderful and give you all kinds of information about their personality, attitudes toward their work, and other things. I do it all the time. However I do not believe that interviewing alone is curation. It can be part of it, but in my opinion the key part of curation is the selection of artwork and description of why it is good or great art. Other than basic information about the artists, everything else is secondary.

Conclusion

There can and will be many opinions about this that differ from mine. Just as there are many different opinions about what great art it is. But this is how I see it. What I do think is true is what Wade Wallerstein (@habitual_truant) said during the call last week. Anyone can be a curator. There are no rules about who can do it. All it requires is the work.

--------------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#curatedart #artist #NFT

12 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Video

A Masterpiece by ix.shells and thoughts on modern online art

Because ix.shells has been in the news so much lately for her work with Tor and her record Christie’s auction I took a long look at her work on Instagram. I have been following her for years but she never jumped out at me enough for me to write about, which I will explain below. But I found this masterpiece she posted in March and I had to share it.

It is random and yet symmetrical. The movement is steady but glitchy and structured all at once. It rotates in two directions and also pops on and off randomly which creates a nice complex motion. The balance between the shapes and their presentation is perfect. The variations make your eyes happy the entire time you are watching it. You never feel repetition, just change. The glitch aspect is integrated just right so it is not upsetting to your eye but provides pleasant pops of change. It is wonderful as white on black. It appears gradated in color and yet not, at the same time. This would be top of my list of works I would love to have on my desk on an infinite objects device to just look at when I want to get lost in thought. I think the title is ‘seems like you spaced out grounding plan in formation’ but I cannot really tell. It is backed by some music by Tim Hecker, something that she does a lot.

One of the features of modern online art is that artists can easily share everything they do. Many artists, Beeple being the big example, create and share something everyday, no matter the quality. But it seems that most code artists just do this naturally. It is like they are image scientists sharing their research with you. They try something, it may work, it may not, but they share it anyway, sometimes even with the code they used to create it, and they move on.

ix.shells is exactly like this. She has lots of work online and when you scan her Instagram feed you have to look to find the works that are more finished among the ones that are experiments. I tend to view work differently, seeing everything as a finished work. This is because I am older and grew up with a different sensibility. There was less space for work to be seen in galleries or museums or catalogs and so every single presentation of art was a big deal. Not so in the digital art, where bits are cheap.

I recently have been thinking about what famous artists from the past like Picasso or Paul Klee or Frida Kahlo would do if they were working today. My guess is that they would post their work like ix.shells does - they would share everything with you as they did it. So when you looked at their feed it would be filled with many experiments of varying quality and then suddenly - a masterpiece - like this work by ix.shells.

------------------------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#Code Art #motion art

17 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Video

Crossing the Interface: Motion Stained Glass

I was reluctant to write about this amazing series which I just saw yesterday for the first time, because there is so much about it I do not know. This was done originally in 2014 as a performance at the Guggenheim, there is a complex philosophical text that is read that goes along with each of the thirteen parts, and there is the story of how it was made, a collaboration with Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst.

But I have decided to just focus on what I see through the prism of Motion Art and perhaps write about the rest later.

There are thirteen pieces and they are all completely unified in style - and yet each pieces is completely unique in its own way. Each piece has either people or animals combined with architecture, nature or a pattern overlay of some sort. Gold and blue dominate the palette, but earth and flesh tones are present, along with a smattering of subtle rainbow gradations.

The imagery is completely religious and reminds me of the stained glass I saw every week in church as a young Catholic. Stained glass naturally abstracts the image it is depicting, and the colors have a special luminescent quality because the light is coming from behind it. The design of these thirteen pieces captures that feeling perfectly, which I think is remarkable since it is mostly photo based.

The movement is great. Each tableau organically flows through a series of images as the text is read in about the same speed, and the images of people and nature and architecture all kind of come in and out of focus as they are moving. This is same technique that Ivona Tau uses that she described here. But it is so fluid and the imagery is so carefully constructed that is gives you a feeling not unlike you are on a boat moving steadily across the water. It just keeps moving past you - the same but different.

Brian Droitcour, the excellent writer for Art in America describes it this way:

“The visual field is organized by shapes that move in repetitive, quasi-recursive patterns, creating a feeling of both movement and stasis.....the scene seems to constantly withdraw from view, even as the figures remain still.”

This is a great description and also a captures something I have been writing about for the past three years in this blog: The combination of painting and motion.

This work is particularly great I think because of how varied the imagery is across the thirteen pieces - all while still fitting into the overall design. Two of the pieces uses fragmented close ups of faces which personalizes and deepens the overall impact. Embedded in a background of roiling water you can see eyes and mouths and red hair and a sudden smile.

Despite the repetition, you could easily watch each one of these pieces many times and still find new things in them, but you can also just sit back and enjoy the flow of shapes moving by. This is what makes it great.

Also, it is beautiful. Much computer generated imagery can get attention just because there is something interesting or new with the technology - even if the work is unpleasant to look at. I make no apologies for wanting artwork I value to be beautiful.*

The only negative thing I will say that I wish it had was a perfect loop. If I am sitting in church contemplating spirituality and life while looking at these beautiful works I would love that they would be seamless.

However, as I have written about before, many natural Motion Artists have had to create their work in a narrative format because in a gallery setting that is expected, just like at film festivals.

There is much that can surely be said about the religious nature of these combined with the philosophical text, but like I said, I just want to focus on the aesthetics of the work here.

Take some time and look at these remarkable works

https://foundation.app/hollyherndon

*For me, included in this beauty is good glitch art, but that is another topic for another day

-----------------------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#gan #Ai art #holly herndon

14 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Video

Ivona Tau on how she creates her beautiful animations

Ivona Tau is a photographer, developer, and artist from Warsaw, Poland. I noticed some really wonderful animations she posted to h=n and was interested in her process, and she was happy to provide the fascinating look into her process which you can read below. It revealed to me that artists that work with GAN and AI and things like make just as many aesthetic decisions as any other type of artist. It is just a different toolset.

(note: She mentions sound below that she includes in some of her work but the particular work I am showing does not have sound)

------------------------------

Ivona Tau:

I work as an A.I. engineer during the day, so I'm familiar with writing the code in Python and training neural networks for various computer vision tasks, such as image classification or object detection. Given my background in photography, I was really excited about the idea of using those methods for creative applications. There is one type of neural network that I use very frequently and it is Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). The way they work is that there are actually two networks - one, generator, tries to generate real-looking images, and the other one, the discriminator, is shown the real images as well as synthetic images created by the generator. The discriminator is given the task of distinguishing the real ones from the fake ones. As they both get better, generator is able to produce some real-looking fake images. There is perhaps a better explanation of how it works -> https://towardsdatascience.com/what-is-a-gan-d201752ec615

Now the interesting part is not just to show GAN pretty images and generate many many more similar images (as it was done already by training GANs on famous paintings and selling the result for thousands https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-one-a-machine-9332-1.aspx ) But the more exciting part of the process is exploring its capabilities by carefully curating inputs and incorporating it as a medium in your own artistic process. I have created my own photography datasets by shooting several thousand photographs, that I use as a starting point in the training process. The data collection step is really important as it influences greatly the results and it also literally teaches A.I. about your way of working, choosing colors, composing, etc. It is really important that the images are consistent. Also, the less ambiguity in the training data, the easier it will be for A.I. to learn.

The learning process is continuous. When I started my Blue Hours project, I took a model that was trained on my day photography of Warsaw architecture (it already knew some concepts related to perspective, buildings, and streets) and then re-trained it by showing uniquely night photography images. As a result, I created an A.I. model capable of creating visuals reminiscent of my night photography dataset. What is fascinating, is that such a model can generate an infinite number of images. It is like a black box that takes any random number and spits out a ready image. Some of them might be similar, but there are infinitely many unique ones. Now, as an artist, your job is to explore this infinite space and choose the images that you like most / the ones that best represent your creative idea. Now what is incredible is that you don't really need to do morphing between any two images as all of the images live on the continuous infinite space and you can always find a path between any two images (the path would traverse some other generated images that are similar and lie somewehere between A and B). This way I create animations - for each second of the video, I traverse 30 images in the generated space in the given direction. To make the videos audio-reactive to sound, I use a cool Python library called Lucid Sonic Dreams that adjusts the pace of the traversal to match the audio waves in the track.

----------------------------------------------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#ai art #gan #photography

14 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Video

Elenor Kopka’s CAKE Interstitials

Elenor Kopka is always great. Her work is always so absolutely Elenor Kopka....her sensibility.....weird, funny, grainy, filled with anthropomorphic objects and odd creatures, and mostly black and white. I have written about her work before when I was a curator at Cross Connect and she just keeps making great work. What is displayed here is one of the four interstitials she made for the CAKE Network (FX) that she posted on Instagram. They are just gifs that play in between shows....that would be a fun job...see all 4 here and see her website here.

What was also refreshing about this was that is had nothing at all to do with NFTs...LOL

-------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#gif aesthetic #elenor kopka

9 notes · View notes

the-art-of-animated-gifs · 3 years

Text

A New Kind of Art

A recent article in the New Yorker made me sit up and pay attention because what the author was talking about was exactly in line with what I have been writing about in this blog for the past three years: Short non-narrative motion work as a new form of art.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-and-the-vibes-revival

The thrust of the article is about the idea of ‘vibe’ which is interesting, but what caught my attention was this phrase, the subtitle of the article:

“Increasingly, what we’re after on social media is not narrative or personality but moments of audiovisual eloquence.”

What is key here is the word ‘audiovisual’ which means motion + audio. The audio is something I have not written much about, focusing more on the lineage and evolution of silent gif motion work*, but the gist is the same. A short series of images played in a sequence. Another key is ‘not narrative’ -- in other words these TikTok clips have nothing to do with telling a story. The clips are about expressing a feeling (in the context of the article - a vibe) in a short non narrative sequence with motion (and sound for Tik-Tok)

In art world terms, expressing a feeling has much more in common with painting or illustration or photography than a movie or television show does. So this new kind of art combines the motion part of the narrative world with the static focused single expression part of the static art world.

I would argue that this can be achieved without sound, and in fact in many cases, such as in an online gallery or on an infinite objects device, the sound is a negative. But I think the idea is the same. A series of images played together in front of you on a device (that may or may not have sound) that evokes a feeling - a moment of audiovisual eloquence.

For all of us who have been looking at gifs and Vine and now Tik tok videos for years it may seem like ‘so what’ but this form of expression has never existed before the computer, and has really only come to flower with the proliferation of screens. We all have multiple screens and so these little works of art are what get people through the day, give them a moment of joy, insight, hope, or just a little smile, as the article eloquently describes. The kind of thing that an illustration or cartoon in a magazine or a billboard or graffiti does irl.....but now more often through the screen of our device. The only real difference is that the screen in our pocket is CAPABLE of displaying motion and sound and so artists use that as a tool of expression.

You would think the the NFT revolution would somehow be part of this but it really is not right now. Most NFT art is static, and much of it comes from a tradition of static irl art. There are many actual canvas and brush artists who are stars of the NFT scene. Beeple, the big money breakthrough artist, despite doing his work all digitally, does almost nothing in motion. And Tik Tok has no discernible influence on the NFT scene right now.

However, there are many very good motion artists coming into the NFT scene now and I am sure that will have an impact. It will be very interesting to see how Motion Art develops as the NFT scene matures.

--------------------

*This lineage comes from the great early years of Tumblr. Interestingly, the writer references Tumblr as a predecessor to the Tik Tok vibe movement he is writing about.

---------------------

If you have found this content valuable considering getting me a cup of coffee

#art #gif aesthetic #tiktok #vibe

8 notes · View notes