Between projects I often make little animations. Sometimes they’re made as a result of learning new software and sometimes I make them to test out an idea or technique.
I’ve decided that I’ll start a regular thing on this here blog - hopefully monthly - where I share some of those gifs and other little animations.
The ideas for the above gifs came from self-portrait I made for the first issue of This and That zine.
On Saturday July 25th I’ll be delivering an online a Blender workshop for Access Space!
The three-hour workshop (13:00 - 16:00) will go through a few basics of using Blender but will mainly focus on making abstract glitchy looping gifs, like the ones that I made for Improviz.
Tickets are £15 and can be purchased directly from Access Space.
For the Improviz gifs one of the requirements that Rumblesan set is that the gifs loop seamlessly. That is, one would not be able to tell where the gifs beings and ends. In Blender making an animation seamless is pretty easy. There’s lots of examples out there but for completion here’s my simple take on it.
With the default cube selected press I and then press on Location. This inserts a keyframe for the location (this menu can also be accessed in Object > Animation > Insert Keyframe). On the Timeline at the bottom move the animation 20 frames. Then, move the cube to somewhere else.
Bcc:, Decoy Magazine’s monthly e-mail subscription programme, ended in 2019. I had made an exclusive artwork for it back in 2018 that was only available to people who subscribed to it, and then in September 2019 at the IRL exhibition at Vivid Projects. If y’all didn’t catch that show here’s my work below:
[video width=“500” height=“750” mp4=“https://www.hellocatfood.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/addictions_and_habits.mp4” loop=“true” autoplay=“true”][/video]
When you identify something toxic in your life you recoil from it, only to be drawn back in again and again. Addictions and Habits is inspired by how technologies built on the idea of enriching our lives have only amplified our anxieties and made us more physically and emotionally vulnerable
NARGIFSUS, the closing eent for Carla Gannis’ second solo show, took plcae on 19th March at TRANSFER in New York. It featured works by 58 artists each responding to the them of selfies. As of 20th all of the gifs are now online :-) Below you can see my gif, No Fucks Given:
For NARGIFSUS artist Carla Gannis and curator Tina Sauerländer invited 50+ international artists to present animated GIF “Selfie-Self Portraits” that provide a broad range of artistic perspectives on contemporary selfie culture and self-display. This online exhibition (released March 20, 2016) follows the NARGIFSUS SCREENING at TRANSFER Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, on the occasion of the closing event of Carla Gannis’s solo show A Subject Self-Defined on March 19, 2016.
On 13th August I delivered a How to Gif workshop at the mac (Midlands At Centre) as part of Future Curious. Prior to this I went a little bit of a Twitter rant about the lack of software dedicated to making animated gifs, espeically within the open source software world.
In this recent rant I talked about some of my fears regarding the delivery of this workshop. Although gifs are everywhere and we consume them every day, they can be quite difficult to make. What I think is sometimes overlooked is that gifs are basically just like any other animation, but saved as a gif.
Every so often on my travels across the information superhighway I come across a Pure Data user asking if animated gif files can be read in Pure Data. Technically speaking they have always been able to be read in Pure Data, but not always in a way that a user usually wants. Using the [pix_image] object a user can read almost any image file format. On Linux this is dependent on ImageMagick, so whatever it can read can (theorectically) be displayed in Pure Data/GEM. The problem arises because [pix_image] doesn’t display animated gifs as animations, only the first frame.
In early September I participated in the GIF Free For All online ehxibition, launched in conjunction with Computer Art Congress 4 - CAC4 Rio de Janeiro, and curated by A. Bill Miller. More info:
Animated GIFs can be created by anyone and are about anything. The animated GIF is ubiquitous and democratic. Online, it’s proliferation coincides with the developing ways we use the Internet. As a unique and accessible moving image filetype, animated GIF functions on the logic of openness and distributed networks in a time of increasing data surveillance and restrictions to access by governing bodies and corporate capitalization of data-spaces.
I have some artwork in the online exhibition of the 50th Issue of Interartive, which looks specifically at Art and Copyright
Art & Copyright is the result of a selection of texts and works among a great number of proposals received in an open call for submissions. Also included are some texts directly selected by the editorial committee due their relevance to the topic. In this issue, our Virtual Gallery hosts the work of several artists and is presented as a group exhibition.
Love it or hate it, Comic Sans is one of the most popular fonts in the world.
Vincent Connare designed the font for Microsoft in 1995. He described it is best being used for “new computer users and families with children”. Despite this it has constantly been misused and can be seen everywhere from school letters, e-mails from government officials and even in documents about the discovery of the Higgs Boson.