GIF Art Influencing the Future of Fashion
With technology adaption subgenres from gaming and internet culture are making a mark on the contemporary fashion scene. Argentinian GIF art megastar and Art Director Gustavo Torres aka Kidmograph has since the beginning of the 2000s developed a singular visual style mixing vaporwave, cyberpunk and retrofuturistic aesthetics, attracting customers like Adidas, Apple, Gucci and Justin Bieber.
Magic Fabric explores how digital and gaming culture intersects with fashion. You being a strong influencer on the digital art scene, is there inspiration you take from the fashion scene?
– Yes, and vice versa. I remember working with Bernhard Willhelm for a collection based on GIFs that I did in 2014. It’s crazy how different branches of the expression can feed each other. I’m still waiting until we can wear animated GIFs. I also worked with A-Trak being his art director in 2013-15, and we did a collaboration with Adidas, a glitched limited edition (Flux). Lastly and but not least, I had the pleasure of collaborating with Virgil Abloh in 2 pieces in 2015-6. He passed away very very early, I’m still gutted.
How do you see retrofuturist art impacting pop culture right now?
– Mmm not sure, but there are always several reasons to bring to the present old concepts with a twist, we base our personal progress on things we have consumed, making a big filter of it and creating something new. At least that was my purpose/vision when I started doing retrofuture GIFs and short imagery. that’s my best water, when the new mixes with the old, regardless of style.
You’re selling your works as NFT:s. Was it an obvious decision to enter the crypto art market or did you have initial doubts?
– Yes, I felt almost a natural consequence after many years of doing digital art for both clients and personal. Doubts came later in time when the scene exploded and companies started to be interested in the NFT. I love some specific things in the space, mainly community aspects (in the Tezos blockchain), but others such as ownership, provenance, galleries, curated events, decentralization, and transparency of creator content/collector..
How will the vision of web3 impact your way of working do you think?
– Well, we are all figuring things out as we speak and work, so I think there are, and there will be many ways that web3 will impact everyone’s life. When I started almost 20 years ago in the digital art scene, I thought that this would be impossible to achieve, now I like to think that this is a natural path of things. The decentralization not only from the middleman or third party figures but the decentralization of content is something that is being worked on in the previous stages (web1, web2) So eventually, the digitalization of anything with value is almost a natural step. We are still early in all this.
If you were cut off from electrical power for a year, what kind of art would you be doing? Or would you be doing art at all?
– I would go back to the pen and paper, and the painting. I have a traditional art background and have painted for years, mainly expressionism/surrealism/abstract/mixed media/collage. Each one of my stages brings me to another, as a linked path.
– I still draw a lot but in specific moments. (when I’m rendering, when I have to quickly set up a concept, and when the power goes off lol) joking, I still do it on a daily basis because it’s where most of the concepts come to life.
Vaporwave is an artistic movement that emerged in 2013. It was inspired by the music scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s, specifically the synthpop genre. Artists who use vaporwave style tend to focus on nostalgia, with a heavy emphasis on the 1980s.
Synthwave is a subgenre of vaporwave that focuses on nostalgic themes such as 80’s pop culture, cyberpunk, and science fiction. This type of art often features retro synthesizers, pixelated graphics, and other 1980s aesthetics.
Retrowave art is a type of art that incorporates elements of hip hop music and video games with anime. This combination creates a new form of art called “retrofuturism.”
Self portrait by Gustavo Torres
