GRAF – Animating images by INSA

Insa is an artist and graphic designer who likes to push those boundaries and create new ways of doing things. Here he has painted an image on the exterior of a building located on Hyperion Drive in Los Angeles, taken a still photograph, then repainted the walls, taken another photo, then repainted the walls again … and so on until he has enough still images to create a moving photo – more commonly known on the internet as a GIF!

The above building was a collaboration between Insa and Stanley Donwood and was commissioned by XL Recordings to launch the debut album from Thom Yorke titled ‘Atoms for Peace’. They repainted these XL Recordings offices four times to create the effect for this moving image.


Insa gives an insight into the creation of the final animating image:-

“My challenge was to take two very static items, a beautiful lino-cut and a less beautiful box of a building, and bring them to life. After a week of sweating in the Los Angeles late summer sun re-painting the whole building several times i got there. Animated as a continuous GIF it may only live online but some would argue that is where most now live their lives…”

Whereas Stanley Donwood takes another a different look at things:-

“Los Angeles is, of course, fucked. Everything is fucked, all of our cities, all of our towns, our villages, our farms, our entire way of living. and I don’t mean fucked in a good way, oh no; I mean it in a very, very bad way. our energy rich and culturally complacent society has doomed everything, and really, we all know this. Or at least, we should do. We have run out of everything, pissed it up against the wall, blown it, spent it, wasted it. We’ve run out of money, of oil, of gasoline, of water, of food, of any resources, of energy, of everything. We are reduced to trying to blast pathetic amounts of gas from solid rock and we don’t care if we poison our water while we’re doing it. The apocalypse is already here, and the saddest thing is that we’re trying to fool ourselves that it isn’t happening. Our politicians are fucking idiots, our heroes are fools, our industries are dying, our farmland is trashed and our culture resembles nothing more than a self-devouring joke. Our architecture is hideous and our art revels in empty platitudes. There is no future; we have evicted ourselves from our own cities, rendered our agriculture poisonous, criminalised the poor, aggrandized the rich, honoured the stupid and ridiculed the intelligent. I don’t pretend to stand outside this fucking mess. I’m just as guilty as anyone.”

Insa was also commissioned to design for the Unit 44 gallery in Newcastle. Carrying on the animating theme around the globe!

• INSA’s work, contray to some at first glace, speaks to an inquisitive and informed viewship.

• INSA’s world is one where art, product, graffiti, fetishism, and desire collide.

• INSA is a fine artist and designer who has established himself from a graffiti background through extensive street level work and gallery shows around the world.

• All images are creditted to Insa’s blog – please visit for more information on his art.