It can be hard to take your eyes off a good GIF. Turns out, it can also be tough to take your eyes off a terrifying one.
In Oswra, a collection of GIFs by self-taught animator Hayden Zezula, we witness baby parts rearranged into all sorts of endlessly-looping abominations. A plaster-white baby head sits atop a churning cone of arms and hands. A dense cluster of legs marches nowhere at all, like a sea anemone with tiny feet instead of tentacles.
The one below's made-up of several cloned bodies, stacked and barely offset, kind of reminiscent of the cards that would leave trails around your screen after a winning game of Solitaire on Windows. He's a shoo-in for the next season of American Horror Story.
They're all equal parts unsettling and mesmerizing, and that combination was something Zezula was very much going for. "The focus is to blend eerie images with visually pleasing loops to keep people interested and uncomfortable at the same time," he says. "I use similar cloning techniques with geometric objects on a regular basis and wanted to try it on something new."
Zezula has been making art under the name Zolloc for four years. About two years ago he started teaching himself animation, using Cinema 4D to generate short, arresting scenes. Part of the reason he likes GIFs so much is simply because they're such quick work. "I also film and edit video and those projects usually go for months. Since my GIFs are only 30 frames, I can quickly go from concept to final in a matter of hours," he says.
Recently, the Austin-based artist has turned his attention to game development. But don't expect to be ripping a chainsaw through a 20-legged toddler cluster anytime soon. Zezula's current project? A "first-person art exploration game."
