Brady Walker<\/strong>: My first question is around how you\u2019re able to create so much \u2014 if you\u2019re the kind of person who does dailies or what your practice looks like. You have a lot of series. So, I\u2019m just wondering how things stack on each other, and how often you create, and how long?<\/p>\nA.L. Crego: Yeah. Nowadays, it isn\u2019t provoked<\/strong> in the sense that let\u2019s do a piece every day or something like this. It was more a consequence of a constant investigation. Because before focusing my work on GIF, I was working a lot in photo and video. <\/p>\nBack then, for me, art was what was in museums and things I see on school tours. I think I was 21 when I understood GIF format as something more artistic because, of course, I always saw GIFs on the web, the cats and the memes and all these things, but I was thinking by then, why are not you using this format for something more artistic? Because photo and video can be used.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So, I started to just experiment with a lot of things: with cinematography, about how to mix video and photo inside a GIF with a perfect loop. And suddenly, I find myself surrounded by tons of work and it was by then that I started to publish it on Tumblr. I started to do street art animations in 2014. But I didn\u2019t know, I was just trying things.<\/p>\n
Like, okay, I can animate this on street art walls on my computer, but I can\u2019t in the streets. And then, I start to mix it with augmented reality. This was 2014, and all these years, from 2014 until 2018, I was totally immersed in the investigation, trying things and working in street art festivals. And during these years, I developed a workflow that still lasts nowadays.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that I propose to do a new piece every day. But every day, I have some new ideas or some old ideas. In the past, when you are painting, if you have an idea in the middle, you have to start another canvas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But in digital art, if you already working on an idea and suddenly another different idea came from the same work, you can \u201csave as,\u201d and you have another project to work on. So, I do a lot of this because sometimes I\u2019m working on ideas. So, I \u201csave as\u201d and put it in a folder for later.<\/p>\n
Blockchain was a good point because I was having a lot of problems with people stealing my work, and I never had the option to prove that it was my work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Art is something that everybody consumes. I had to start to think about how to connect this work with the blockchain. And it was, I think, in 2018 when MakersPlace finally contacted me to join them because I wasn\u2019t really interested in studying the code side. I was more interested in the visual side, in the artistic side.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thanks to MakersPlace, I started minting my work, and I started to fully understand how I can work with the blockchain more. Because by then, I had a lot of work waiting to be minted.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I understand the blockchain and the metaverse as a whole. For me, it\u2019s very hard to divide. Same in the real life. I don\u2019t divide museums from street art. For me, both are art. They are different contexts. But you can find good art in both places.<\/p>\n
And nowadays, thanks to the platforms like Twitter and this concept with the blockchain that links to the IPFS, we know how to find great digital work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
BW<\/strong>: Can you tell me a little bit about your visual beats project, speaking of series of pieces?<\/p>\nALC<\/strong>: Sure, thanks for the question because it\u2019s a series I enjoy. Because since I started to work with GIFs, I realized it was an obvious thing. GIFs are beats, in terms of music, because I played drums too. I am a kind of musician. I don\u2019t play in a band, but I play drums at home.\u00a0<\/p>\nI realized that GIFs, despite being silent, can resound. Visual Beats was an idea about the musicality of GIFs, not the music of GIFs because they are silent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the musicality is about three things. The elements are the melodies. The background is a motion canvas that is the atmosphere of the song. And then the perfect loop is what creates the rhythm. So when you look at each of these pieces, they are all designed at 100 bpm\u2019s, so they all have the same rhythm. It is a kind of symphony of silence.<\/p>\n
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I started to think about this series for the musicality and the concept of the perfect loop. It\u2019s very hard to accept a GIF that is not seamless because it breaks this feeling. In a good GIF, you can\u2019t find where it starts and where it ends. Our brain tries to find the stitching point, but it can\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This idea came after a previous series I did that they call Hypnotic Machines. That was pretty similar because the technique is the same.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s frequency modulation, a very old technique, but I\u2019ve been playing with it a lot for the past two or three years. In Hypnotic Machines, the focus was more on the geometric noise, the constant motion that has a lot of elements, but all of them simultaneously.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Hypnotic Machine 2<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nBW<\/strong>: I\u2019m curious how you\u2019ve seen your collectors display your work. Especially the Visual Beats. I love them. I just pictured myself getting five screens, and they\u2019re all kind of in sync. How do you think displaying GIFs works best?<\/p>\nALC<\/strong>: I have one Meural at home that is from 2016. They gave it to me because I helped them back in the day to make some GIFs. I was thinking in 2016, I want to see my GIF in my living room. I searched for digital canvases and found two companies. One Japanese and one American. Japanese never replied, but the American one was Meural. They replied three hours later.\u00a0<\/p>\nI always say that GIFs depend on the web. Because GIFs are from the web. The Internet is their natural ecosystem. And I value that a lot because working with GIFs is like working with a website.<\/p>\n
There is a lack of information about the technical side of GIFs. Because people try to render a GIF, and maybe they don\u2019t know how it works from the inside. They have GIFs that are 90 megabytes, for example, and this is crazy. If you are rendering a GIF of 90 megabytes, just do it in a video.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But when you import a video to a digital canvas, you will have this little jump at the end of the loop, and I hate that. Imagine someone watching Hypnotic Motion and it stops for one second every time. It\u2019s not hypnotic.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For me, my favorite screen to showcase is your phone or your computer. The web is the canvas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
BW<\/strong>: When you are designing pieces, how do you decide on aspect ratio, just based on whether this is for a phone or a computer?<\/p>\nALC<\/strong>: Actually, yesterday, I was talking with a friend about that. Sometimes, yes. Landscape or portrait. But, for example, for exhibitions or some curated works, I always ask first about the screen. Because I want to adapt.\u00a0<\/p>\nIf I am working on my own idea, I don\u2019t pay too much attention to this. Some ideas require landscape if you want something more narrative. And some ideas feel more poignant or powerful if they are vertical.<\/p>\n
But I will adapt to the screen I am creating for. I find some kind of joy in this kind of challenge. Imagine they say, \u201cNo, we have three screens, but we\u2019d like to work with three different pieces simultaneously.\u201d I will think something about three pieces that complement each other instead of doing three individual pieces.<\/p>\n
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