by Paddy Johnson on September 24, 2014


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.

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by Whitney Kimball on April 15, 2014

We just spent twenty minutes playing with Andrew Benson’s brand new visual distorter/webcam feature Flow Cam. I made my own Marilyn Minter! You can too.
Animal’s Marina Galperina has talked to Benson about the effect which is not, in fact, datamoshing.
“It uses per-pixel motion analysis (optical flow) with a little conditioning as a control signal for image distortion,” Benson tells her. “Similar to how mpeg/divx works, but not based on that tech. It’s a kind of video feedback effect.”
And if you really want to melt your face off become one with the digital, make a GIF of yourself and then run that GIF through the gif melter. But be warned! It’s probably not good for those prone to seizures.
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