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Melt your eyes with psychedelic GIF art

Thomas McMullan Read more December 16, 2015

The GIF is the terza rima of the 21st century. There you go. That’s an ostentatious statement for you. Looping animations and the poetic form of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’d justify the comparison, but it’s the day after the office Christmas party. Leave me alone.

Pi-Slices, real name Philip Intile, is a teenage wunderkind. He’s an artist-slash-curator, founder of

GIF Artists Collective and creator of short, strange, animated squares. Intile aims to show that there’s more to GIFs than shoddy memes, and his website features a growing number of artists working with that particular file format.

Since starting the project in November 2014, the collective has been accepting submissions based on a theme for each month. These range from “360 Degrees” to “Holidays” and the results encompass everything from self-assembling snowflakes to morphing blobs of ambiguous goo.

There is a lot to say about the prominence of GIF art, and why artists are drawn to the looping format. There’s nostalgia for the GIFs of the old web, sure, but there’s more to it than that. There’s a sense of loading, of process, that is both deeply reassuring and inevitably troubling when the repetition goes on for too long. I am, however, unable to write anything intelligent on the matter right now. Read this instead.

Then look at some more GIFS.

Then read this: The art of the Twitter bot.