THE MOTION ART JOURNAL: ANOPTIC’S INSCRUTIBLE MACHINES

THE MOTION ART JOURNAL: ANOPTIC’S INSCRUTIBLE MACHINES

David Koblesky — May 5, 2022

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MAY 5TH, 2022

I thought the name sounded familiar, and when I reached out to the artist who calls themself anoptic to say that I wanted to write about their work, I received the reply: "We did this back in the Tumblr days, right?" And it was true. I had shared their work and wrote a profile for a Tumblr blog called Cross-Connect over three years ago.

The Tumblr era produced incredible artists like an optic, who did it for no other reason than that they loved doing it; it's where Beeple, XCOPY, and many others started. Tumblr is still a great place to find amazingly well-curated galleries and artists of all kinds, including an optic, who still posts their work there. The blog I wrote had 250,000+ followers. Whenever I want to find art that inspires me, I go to Tumblr blogs I have been following for years.

What I wrote back then holds true today, and hopefully, my editor does not think I am lazy. Still, I cannot think of a way to improve what I wrote back then, except to say that the artist called anoptic now sells work on the Tezos blockchain also that their work is beautiful.

Anoptic creates geometric gifs that are beautiful but at the same time feel old-fashioned, like something Tesla would have created if he had a computer in 1900. While anoptic prefers to remain anonymous, they did make an interesting comment about animated gifs: "The art of the gif is in the loop. The single idea is repeated over and over - both unending and unchanging at the same time. A glimpse at processes normally invisible, like peering into the workings of the inscrutable machine. Done well; it's mesmerizing." Exactly.'

Anoptic was kind enough to answer some questions about their work.

Where are you located? Where did you grow up? Did you have art training?

Originally from Chicago, I lived in LA for a while and now live in south Italy. No formal training, art or otherwise, autodidact all the way.

How did you start making motion art?

Animation is one of my favorite things, but I don't have the patience to do it the old-fashioned way. So I'm always looking for ways to make procedural animation - get the computer to do the moving-things-around part. I've used everything: Flash, Photoshop, After Effects, Processing, and Touch Designer. I love to play with new toys!

How has your current style evolved? What caused you to work with motion? How do you feel about motion work vs. static work? Because essentially, your work is static but in motion, if that makes sense?

It makes perfect sense; the fractal stuff is just that. I make an image I like and then try animating parameters to see if anything works. Mostly, they devolve into noise pretty quickly, but sometimes I find something pleasing. The problem is rendering. I have a shitty old video card - rendering at HD would take days, and that's not an option. So recently, I've started playing with Hydra-Synth. It's a live coding environment in javascript based on video synthesis. It can also be used as a library for making interactive and generative art—very groovy! 

As for motion vs static: I mean, motion is about time. Time is the medium and the material, the primary theme and preoccupation. And that's important because moving through time is what we're doing—taking uptime is more impactful than taking up space simply because there's so much less of the former available to us. But a static image is outside time; it's just an instant and takes up no time - completely different ways of looking at the world. And I get bored easily, so I go back and forth.

How long have you been in the NFT scene? How has it gone so far?

In January, I minted my first NFT on HeN, so just three months. Going pretty well, I guess; people seem to like my stuff. I mean, shit, people are buying my art - that's wild! And humbling, stressful, and confusing! I have no idea what I'm doing, but neither does anyone else - just playing the game.

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