At the start of Nicola's Dazed takeover, he emailed us about five innovative GIF designers from around the globe. Now, we've asked these Tumblr-ers to make their own adaptation of Nicola's panda illustration, the symbol at the heart of Nicola's new concept fashion line Nicopanda.
The first was German Lavrovskiy. The second to exhibit is Mr-GIF, an art collective from NYC, made up of Jimmy Repeat and Mark Portillo. Since early last year, the pair have been pushing for the revival of the GIF and their eclectic style has even caught the attention of larger than life HipHop mogul Rick Ross.
Tell me about the panda GIF you made.
We wanted to experiment with transparency. Not many artists do that. And we're edgy.
Tell me about your practice and style.
We tend to experiment a lot, so our style changes very often, trying different things out was always our goal.
What do you do when you’re not making GIFs?
Party and bullshit, party and bullshit.
How did you start making GIFs?
We were masturbating too much and needed a new hobby. 2008 was a fucked up year.
What’s your all time favourite GIF and GIF designer?
Seyran Dalipovski
Recent months have seen a return of the GIF as an item of popular discourse and funny thing to drop into an email. What do you put this down to?
It's the modern day emoticon. We live in a visual world where a moving image can express way more than words. GIFs are being used as a vessel to communicate which is really rad. And everyones grown up with it.
Where do you think the art of the GIF maker is going?
Who the fuck knows. That's the beauty of it. We can predict it all we want - but who really cares? There will always be artists that will be producing mind boggling stuff 5 years from now with the same file format.
