The End is Near, and in Motion. Street Art Made for the Web
Experiencing street art and murals becomes heightened when it's a random discovery, and the tweeting and Instagrams help makes these works more popular when its the subject of an online safari.
It goes a step further with INSA's 'gif-iti' pieces. A series of designs on one wall, repainted with the intent of being animated, makes street art site specific to two locations; the source wall, and then later on the internet.
The web is the final gallery destination for "Hollywood Dooom," a collaboration between UK artists Stanley Donwood and INSA. On the exterior and interior walls of the Los Angeles offices of indie label XL Recordings. The animated work of Los Angeles being destroyed, a monochrome warning of an impending end, hypes the Feb. 24 launch of "Amok" by the Thom Yorke led experimental band Atoms For Peace. "I worked with Stanley's awesome and iconic lino cut imagery of the destruction of LA, which is the album cover artwork," wrote INSA.
"I love the fact [that the Internet] enables me to see new work that is being painted all over the world," later said INSA to The Atlantic. "But in the same breath this means I don't really take any of the works in. No matter how big a painting or extensive an installation, all I'm seeing is small online images which aren't necessarily how the artists wanted [their art] to been seen."
It allows INSA to reinterpret the intent of murals as an accessible form of public art -- not limited by being only in galleries.
Taking that as the context, I hope other artists take an occasional experiment with animated gif-wall-writing. Picture Sand One's figurative girls batting their eyelashes, the lettering of Retna falling like rain, or the more minimal forms of Nomadé attacking our urban walls.
