The street artist Insa is known for his Gif-iti, a technique in which he paints a mural over and over with slight changes and documents each piece to create an animation later. Normally if one stumbles upon a piece by Insa, the animation can be viewed through an augmented reality app, but his latest work required a satellite to see the whole thing.
Space Gif-iti was commissioned by Ballantines as part of a series they do in collaboration with creative people and it’s officially the world’s largest animated painting. The final product is composed of four separate images, each of which required the artist and his team to cover 45,931 square feet of space.
Insa tells Creative Review:
“This is way bigger than anything I’ve ever done before!,” INSA told CR. “It poses a whole other level of challenges: to sketch up an image this large, but with the help of a trusty trundle wheel, rope and some mathematical equations, I worked numerous techniques that were new for me for painting on this scale.” …
“The design and planning I did on my own, a logistics team were coordinating the satellite and filming, then my assistant along with a team of 20 people were on site to help get it done.” …
“Once the work was done, we had to wait a week until the images were sent back to us from space,” INSA explains. “This was a very tense moment because we couldn’t be sure the project had worked until we overlaid all four days’ images together. Once the images were retrieved it was a simple process of overlaying them into a looping gif; for me the actual gif was made in space by the satellite – I just had to compress it fit for web viewing.”
You can see the short documentary about the process embedded above and here’s the fruit of all that labor:
(Image: Ballantines)
