"Radioactive Yeti" [mp3 removed]
Another ambient-style work using the set-up described in the next post, except that I made the Metaphysical Function patches myself and didn't use the convolution reverb.
"Radioactive Yeti" [mp3 removed]
Another ambient-style work using the set-up described in the next post, except that I made the Metaphysical Function patches myself and didn't use the convolution reverb.
A little Wikipedestrian research on stereograms for the previous post pulled up the above GIF, based on images from Mars Spirit Rover. Continuing the spread of good old American cornfed mediocrity to the planets, the depicted rock formation was named "Home Plate" by JPL scientists. (The same literary genius has been in evidence at least since Mars Pathfinder Sojourner discovered rocks called "Barnacle Bill," "Yogi," and "Scooby Doo.")
Atlantic blogger Rebecca Greenfield has just discovered "highbrow" animated GIFs - of a supermodel with hair blowing in the breeze!
Thanks for the shoutout from pdsc in the comments:
Haha, this article is such a joke. Head to Dump.fm, computersclub.org, Tommoody.us, or Rhizome.org to see what is actually happening with the animated gif as an 'artistic' file format. As @Wakest mentioned, the animated gif has been used for many years now in netart, and before being recognized as 'high brow' was a form of folk art. Jamie Beck's work is way too close to limited motion video loops to really be 'groundbreaking' in the art world.
"Animated photography" using GIF loops has the smell of novelty, a la the "solid photography" of yesteryear (sculptures based on photos taken from multiple angles), holograms, or even stereograms that aspire to classical (that is, ordinary) beauty. The point of freezing the fleeting perfection of the human form is rather blown when a part of the icon wiggles.
Not to say a good artist couldn't make something of this, but Jamie Beck's work is unintentionally funny, like a lenticular Jesus nodding at his Last Supper compatriots as you move a postcard back and forth.
Update: DS notes that the tumblr post of fashion model Coca Rocha announcing these "artistic" GIFs has over 10,000 "notes." Let's add that and the Atlantic post to the list of recent mass media "discoveries" of GIFs. We seem to be at a tipping point now where people who are concerned with "art" or "net art" have to deal with the fact that GIFs have broken through, despite never actually having gone away. What has been for the last few years an uphill battle to educate will change tack to a slightly apologetic, "yeah, well, heh, I use them in a slightly different way."
Article by Frances Colpitt discussing work by David Szafranski, John Pomara, Jeff Elrod, yours truly and others, published just before I moved to NY from Texas and mentioned in Gene McHugh's essay about my work. This article was once available in text form through a service called Findarticles, which was cataloguing print magazine content in the early days of the Web before being subsequently acquired and reacquired by various corporate entities. Eventually the text disappeared so I made this poor man's PDF.
Update, 2020: Nine years later I finally made an actual PDF of this.
Many thanks to Gene McHugh for a thorough and thoughtful essay on my artwork in his Post Internet blog. Many threads are pulled together over the course of a few decades that might not seem to be part of any overall pattern. It's only half-clear to me since I'm still in the middle of it.
I like the way the essay keeps coming back to the theme of getting down into the structure of things. McHugh's description of photorealism is terrific--better than I've articulated about what's going on in the paintings I did in that style--the idea that painting reveals something about photography by isolating its conventions in another medium. And he traces that same kind of thought process through several phases of working that don't seem connected at all: the sub-canvas (paper) investigation in the abstract paintings; the cybermedia-about-printmedia in the MSPaintbrush portraits; right up to GIFs and other ostensibly outmoded programs and filetypes. The connections to cyberpunk lit are also much appreciated; I'm constantly thinking about what the movement got right and what it got wrong.