by Paddy Johnson on July 8, 2016
Back in May It’s Nice That used a few GIFs to illustrate the game artist and sound producer Sam Rolfes created for Adult Swim. As far as I can tell, the general concept is this: a fucked up figure floats in space while squares are shot it at. You control the figure. Every time a shape hits the body, it makes a noise. You like it when shapes hit the body, because you can literally turn the game into a drum machine. It’s kinda fun, and of course, moving the figure around turns it into a dancer.
The GIFs are really about getting you to the game, but they work on their own as well. There’s an unlikely janky quality to the loops that’s unusual for GIFs drawn from videos. As a result, they seem to celebrate their own GIFiness, rather than simply approximate another medium. It’s a great example of an auxiliary material can have its own life and vitality.
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by Michael Anthony Farley on June 8, 2015
If there was a mudslide in the uncanny valley, the devastation might look something like Alan Resnick’s CGI self-portraits. The artist has developed his own mythology in which his creepy alter ego is obsessed with creating a digital “backup” copy of himself to attain virtual immortality. Resnick shows us everything that can possibly go wrong with that endeavor. This epic quest includes everything from the GIF-packed tumblr Face Feed to a totally bizarre tech-startup-parody infomercial produced for Adult Swim. It’s not all always just about preserving Resnick’s face for posterity, however. He also created a GIF archive of the art collective Wham City’s members, collaborators, neighbors, and friends [including me!] for Dan Deacon’s app-interactive music video Konono Ripoff N°1. And last year, we saw his unsettling animated portraits harvested from found images of gazing globes in “Base Period” at Springsteen. We’re all going to live forever.
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