New App GIF-ITI Brings Street Art to Life

Benjamin Sutton October 9, 2014 ShareShare This Article

The British street artist INSA is well known for painting (and then repainting, and repainting, and repainting again) murals so that he can photograph them at different stages and turn them into psychedelic animated GIFs, and now he’s come up with a much simpler way to bring static murals to life. His new app, dubbed INSA’s GIF-ITI Viewer (and available for free from the Apple Store), taps into augmented reality technology to turn otherwise unchanging street art pieces into trippy animations similar to INSA’s long-running “GIF-ITI” series.

A mural by INSA, from the “Loading…” series, painted in Shanghai, China.
Photo: Courtesy the artist, via Tumblr.

If you don’t have a sufficiently psychedelic street art mural in your immediate surroundings on which to test out INSA’s app, we feel sorry for you, but fear not! The artist has uploaded images of a number of his own murals that users can turn to, by training their mobile devices’ lenses on their computer screens, to see the app in action. We’ll report back as soon as we’ve had a chance to test out the app; for the time being we’re mired on a “loading data” screen.