Chinese filmmaker Kit Chung has been experimenting with GIFs pulled from a video he made shooting portrait close-ups on Line 2, Beijing’s oldest running subway rail. The voyeuristic loops of subtle facial gestures are a little bit Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests meet Chris Marker’s Passengers. He’s been posting to his Tumblr which also reminds of Rebecca Davis’ New York Underground series of Instragrams featured recently on ANIMAL. In an interview with Creators Project, Chung explains the shift toward animation:
I didn’t want to edit the GIF into a loop that looks just like a video. Instead, I used it to created a “moving portrait” and got some surprisingly interesting results. In these GIFs, the person is in the train going forward without a beginning or an end. Because of the GIF, these people exist in the train forever.
What a nightmare — a beautiful, compelling nightmare.
There's something incredibly appealing about subtle, repetitive, perpetual motion seemingly absent of the human hand, whether it's a massive mobile by Alexander Calder, a creepy portrait GIF from the Beijing subway, or a porny/arty looping six-second subversion series of a new social media app. Artist Laurent Debraux, whose work was…
For his current project “Please Mind the Gap,” photographer Weilun Chong took portraits of commuters at the Mass Rapid Transit stations in Singapore and Hong Kong. Instead of minding the aforementioned gap, he's pausing to catch strangers passing through, from subway car to platform, from vessel to vessel, from one arbitrary moment of…
According to a 2012 survey by the Straphangers Campaign, subway stations' conditions are pretty much the same or improving since the year before. The survey sampled 251 platforms at 120 stations. The only factors that got worse were water damage and graffiti, which was found at 27% of examined stations…
Chinese filmmaker Kit Chung has been experimenting with GIFs pulled from a video he made shooting portrait close-ups on Line 2, Beijing’s oldest running subway rail. The voyeuristic loops of subtle facial gestures are a little bit Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests meet Chris Marker’s Passengers. He’s been posting to his Tumblr which also reminds of Rebecca Davis’ New York Underground series of Instragrams featured recently on ANIMAL. In an interview with Creators Project, Chung explains the shift toward animation:
