The idea of combining street art and animated GIFs initially struck me as surprising, since one medium is strongly tied to the real world and the other, to the digital realm. However, Spanish photographer and animator A. L. Crego found an inventive way of bringing street art to life through adding motion to the images.
Crego takes photographs of murals, stencils, and other forms of street art, and then adds movement to the pictures. Sometimes the motion is very subtle; the artist just makes the eyes of a character move, or makes a thought bubble with the word “think” arise from a silhouetted figure. At other times the movement is quite bold and dizzying, such as in his two versions of Red Hole: this mural on the side of the building, showing concentric circles of faces, is made to spin in one GIF and given a pulsing effect in another GIF.
I especially like the piece which shows a colourful, exaggerated man holding long string, from which a realistic heart swings, and the image which shows the windows of a yellow building sliding back and forth, while the eyes of a woman on a wall filled with graffiti look on.
The original street art is by a variety of artists, including ERRE, Sokram, Liqen, and some unidentified graffiti artists.