Inspiration
Thinking deeply about the evolution in medium & dimensionality in various artist’s careers… Jenny Holzer moving from text on paper to LED projections, digital scrolls. Warhol’s Screen Tests. Cindy Sherman from Photography to Film. Richter from painting on canvas to printing on glass. William Kendridge’s animated charcoal drawings. Barbara Kruger from graphic collage to video & sound installation. Rauschenberg's move from collage to assemblage to collaborations with dancers and composers, performance. Mike Kelley’s move into video loops, animated collage and installation.
While the transition from one medium to another represents creative growth and obvious metaphors of icicles, boiling water & steam; caterpillars and butterflies etc...I began thinking specifically about the act of dissolving or deconstructing and re-forming into something new, perhaps even superior or more pure. Solve et Coagula.
I also had to think about time, as a still is just that, a frozen moment that often allows the viewer to project their own fantasy movement or subjective temporality onto it, a moving image has to deal with time in a more confrontational sense. The medium of the GIF, more specifically the seamless loop is somewhere in-between a frozen moment and linear time. It is the eternal return. Relating more to the infinite, meditation, trance and the ouroboric nature of lifecycles. Where narrative time moves forward (past → future), a loop folds time back on itself. What results is a new kind of experience: duration without progression. That difference—time that doesn’t lead anywhere— is why the loop relates more to a painting or dance than it does to a movie. The loop offers radical reprieve for a world obsessed with never ending novelty, seemingly incapable of movement without the guise of progress attached.
Process
Each work began as a fully completed handmade hyper layered collage that was then fed into AI & prompted to produce dozens of variations of video direct from the collage source. Those outputs were brought into Premiere/After Effects to create new hybrid video and then finally imported back into Photoshop as individual frames, retouched, and edited down to their final looping form.
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