Animating Death

by Art Fag City on September 24, 2008 · 4 comments


Saul Chernick, Totentanz 2.0 (After Heinrich Knoblochtzer), 2008

Art Fag City friend Saul Chernick sent along an animated gif today I felt worthy of posting. With Chernick’s permission I’m also publishing a portion of his email correspondence explaining his interest in the file format.

Seeing Kevin Bewersdorf’s show [Monuments to the INFOspirit] inspired me to try out some ideas for gifs. At his opening he explained how gif files are able to achieve a level of sharpness video animation generally can’t produce. I was intrigued by the fact that he was able to to manipulate the screen texture with such intentionality. It reminded me of how print makers are often concerned with similar issues: resolution and surface texture. I thought it would be cool to process imagery produced by an old, manual technology (woodcut) through this contemporary technology and and see how the marks would change.

These woodcuts in particular would have been pretty cheap in their day much like gifs, which get passed around the net freely.

I liked the idea of animating Death in perpetuity too.

Click here to see the original source.

Related: IMG MGMT: The Undead. 

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  • http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/ L.M.

    That’s a nice one, texture illusions are always interesting in a gif format.

  • http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/ L.M.

    That’s a nice one, texture illusions are always interesting in a gif format.

  • http://momoshowpalace.com MOMO

    Ah – that’s why everyone is interested in gifs this week… Another blog mentioned Sally Mckay (http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/gifs/)

    I’ve been animating gifs with java script for a year or so – enter your 8 favorite colors or shapes and the animation finds all 8000 compositions. I’ve called them “MOMO Makers” because they find the compositions for me, as a search tool it discovers things quickly that might take me years.

    See http://momoshowpalace.com/EMPM3.html
    (roughly 10 million compositions!)
    or the first: http://momoshowpalace.com/momomaker.html

    … xM

  • http://momoshowpalace.com MOMO

    Ah – that’s why everyone is interested in gifs this week… Another blog mentioned Sally Mckay (http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/gifs/)

    I’ve been animating gifs with java script for a year or so – enter your 8 favorite colors or shapes and the animation finds all 8000 compositions. I’ve called them “MOMO Makers” because they find the compositions for me, as a search tool it discovers things quickly that might take me years.

    See http://momoshowpalace.com/EMPM3.html
    (roughly 10 million compositions!)
    or the first: http://momoshowpalace.com/momomaker.html

    … xM

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