Vince Mckelvie isn’t a GIF maker, but he gets featured on this page today regardless thanks to the GIF screengrabs by Prosthetic Knowledge. The GIFs come from Electric Pulse, Mckelvie’s single-serving website (a phenomenon I’ve written about on Artnet) are a collaboration with Chuck Anderson and music by Juno Akasawa.
This particular work takes a viewer on a tour of what exploding rocks and meteors, Tron-like imagined computer space, and rotating balls of goo. The more you move your cursor, the more responsive the piece appears to be. It’s pretty great, but the bit of genius here is the dash cam footage near the beginning of the tour. It’s the only bit of found material, it situates the user in the driving seat of car. It reminds me of abstract painters who decide to render one small part of their painting realistically. In those cases, it’s often a flourish used to indicate rendering skill, but the real trick is integrating two disparate elements seamlessly. Mckelvie has unified these two types of images perfectly.
