A.L. Crego

For A.L. Crego, the GIF is not a joke format from the early internet. It’s a way of thinking. The self-taught digital artist from Galicia, in the northwest of Spain, works in the space between the stillness of a photograph and the doomed forward motion of film, building hypnotic loops that translate his own mental images into something like a visual mantra. He came to the form after noticing that moving images make people think faster, and more freely, than almost anything else. His work has a sci-fi classical aesthetic and the strange logic of something pulled straight from the subconscious. His inspiration comes not from software or hardware but from people, books, poetry, sociology, psychology and the quotes he writes himself. Now a genuine heavy-hitter in the world of GIF-making, he has been sought out by DJs, artists and agencies, and his work on the blockchain has fed real debates about intellectual property and the value of digital art in a decentralised world. He takes the GIF out of the browser and into projectors, digital canvases, cinemas and augmented reality, playing with the newborn “digital public space” and quietly asking what a museum, an artwork, or even reality is supposed to be. The web is the canvas. The web is the audience. The web is the gallery. The web is the museum.