Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Here Are 10 GIFs That Will Restore Your Faith in GIFs

Here Are 10 GIFs That Will Restore Your Faith in GIFs:
Matthew DiVito's animated GIFs would be right at home at MoMA.
ellipse.gif The animated GIF is one of the purest forms we have of Internet-native artistry. It is almost always ridiculous and almost always wondrous, and that is because at its best it is almost always the product of a knowing amateur. In that, it is much like the Internet itself. And yet the GIF, bless its GIFy heart, knows its place: it exists almost solely to make already-funny images of Michael J. Fox and Homer J. Simpson and Pulp Fiction and Mean Girls and corgis and cats even more hilarious.
But: almost solely. GIFs can also become, when they choose to be, things of remarkable beauty. And few things demonstrate that more clearly than the work of Matthew DiVito, who is a freelance graphic designer and, as a side job, an animator of GIFs. In 2011, DiVito wanted some extra practice with Cinema 4D. So he started creating animations -- GIFs whose purpose was not to provide ironic commentary on current events, but to provide beauty itself. DiVito began cataloguing his mesmerizing creations on Tumblr, where he has since built up a large and loyal following for his work.
And no wonder. DiVito's decidedly non-Nyan-cat-like productions are perfectly at home on the Internet, but would be just as appropriate as MoMA installations. They transform ironic repetition -- the core component of the GIF -- into something much more meaningful. Into something, you might say, profound.

TRIGON.gif smh.gif rough_seas.gif reflect.gif typeA.gif triduo.gif hexa.gif


Carlos Jiménez Cahua

Carlos Jiménez Cahua:

Carlos Jiménez Cahua
Work from Recent Work.
“My recent artistic practice is motivated by contemplation upon an often-neglected aspect of photography, namely the paper upon which photographs are made—not the type of paper (e.g., matte, glossy, etc.), but rather, the paper as such, cleaved from the imagery upon it. Focusing on the paper as an elemental (rather than incidental) piece permits a heightened negotiation between the materials and the outcome. The work I have been making recently is then modernistic (in the Greenbergian sense) in its conception, insofar as the very variables of the medium bear a significant causational relationship to that which is produced.
More recently I have largely (though not entirely) forgone straight representation in my photography yet still have edged toward the traditional site of photographic making, the darkroom; much of the work can be considered photograms. This return to the darkroom felt necessary to advance my modernistic interests in the medium of photography. Having put aside a faithful printing of the negative has permitted bypassing the regular tendencies of language that typically surrounds photography, namely that based on socioeconomics, journalism, semiotics, biography and psychology, among others, of course.
By the reductive process of making photographic work not functioning as a mimetic index of the real world, and instead (more faithful to the etymological sense of the word, photo-graphy) pursuing the medium as the arrested action of light upon paper, I seek to investigate the visual language of photography, concentrated and independent, a language, I believe, that need not necessarily borrow from the “real world.” In this sense, my recent work is motivated by a formalistic investigation of photography in a reduced form, selectively divorced from straightforward mimesis.
As the role of photographic paper is amplified, so too does its existence in an installed form become even more critical. This has led to a growing emphasis upon installation in my recent work.” – Carlos Jiménez Cahua

A Dried Seahorse

(title unknown): Sugested: A Dried Seahorse

»Pearls«, 1996 by Vasko Lipovac.