INSA, the innovative GIF-iti artist who has already blown our tiny minds with pieces painted on street walls and converted into animated GIFs, has just raised his game.
You may have already seen some of his works online, which are created from murals painted on walls, photographed, re-painted and then re-photographed before being converted into the format. The mesmerising result looks like this:
Now, though, he's enlisted a team of 20 and a satellite 431 miles above the earth to create the world's largest GIF.
Painted on the ground in Rio de Janeiro over four days, the artwork - inspired by his trademark 'Looking For Love' design - measures some 57,515 square metres made up of four images totalling 14,379 square metres each.
"I was approached by Ballantine’s who asked if I had any crazy ideas for pushing my work to another level," he told Mashable. "I said I want to paint something big enough to be seen from space and to animate it. A week later they said 'we'd like to help you do that'."
The piece was painted over six days, with three days set aside for the first layer and prep work, and 24 hours for each of the subsequent three frames.
INSA and Ballantine's collaborated with the commercial satellite division of Airbus to access a pair of Pleiades satellites which could be tasked with shooting a 100km square image at a resolution of one pixel per 50 cm squared.
INSA's GIF works are a result of him thinking about how his work is consumed online, and the way art - which often takes some time to create - is reduced in pixels and hampered by screen resolutions.
"I'd been thinking a lot about how people were actually seeing my work," he says. "Even if I painted a huge mural anywhere in the world, I realised more people were looking at the few photos of it that circulate online."
"It seemed a shame the level of work that was going into something that was only going to be seen as a small image online, but then I just thought why not make the internet, and those few images, the best way to view my work - even make it the only platform for seeing the final work. And GIFs are the ultimate internet fodder."
So is there a perverse joy in labouring over something and then releasing it as a 600 pixel artwork? "Yes, it's exactly that. I love the idea that I was putting all this work in for such a small thing. There is something cathartic about it. It exaggerates the disposability of images and artwork."
Ballantine's have also collaborated with producer Black Coffee to create a human orchestra and skateboarder Kilian Martin.
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