INSA – “The Cycle Of Futility”

(Update: see new news on NO AD in footnote at bottom)

Street artist INSA has explored the far off boundaries of technology with his latest hi-tech work “The Cycle Of Futility” in Shoreditch.

With most street art basically what you see is what you get, the image is the message. INSA though works with the old animation idea of painted frames each one incorporating a small movement from the previous one which you subsequently view as a looping gif online.

He has now pushed the art a further step by exploiting Augmented Reality technology. You download the free App onto your iPhone, point the phone at the wall and the powers of augmented reality replace the static real-art on the walls with the whirling animated gif on your phone. Wow!

INSA Gif-iti Tumblr

The Cycle of Futility features the full rites of passage from life’s beginnings to skulls representing death, while the in-between bit is an unrelenting assault of authority – who’d be a street artist?  Perhaps we can take some pleasure from the fact that the police endlessly chase but never catch anything.

Each painted mural was an important and equal step on the process of creating an animated piece of art, what remains on the wall may appear as a mural but actually the art piece is the App animation. The mural on the wall is no more than just the last frame of the animation, not that it is any less valid as a mural of course.

The technology isn’t new, adverts have utilised Augmented Reality for a while and Jordan Seilers advert busters have appeared in New York where Augmented Reality replaces the advert with a piece of art, thankfully RJ at Vandalog has that covered.

The earliest INSA piece we can recall was a comparatively small seemingly abstract patterned paste up spotted in 2006 though these two photos date from 2007 and 2008 respectively, curiously the tattered remnants of that 2008 can still be made out by Old St roundabout to this day.

London, 2007

London, 2008

We realised later that the abstract patterns were in fact women’s legs in stripy tights ending in a foot shod in very high heeled stilettos and these were complimented by abstract studies of female buttocks, combined in this 2008 repeating pattern.

London,2008

We also caught up with the fact that INSA started out as a graffiti writer, a background we saw in some stunning bits glossy graffiti writing, this man LOVES bling.

London, 2009

INSA’s art shows have been epic magnificence. In 2012 he showed “Self Reflection Is Greater Than Self Projection“, a superb immersive installation room inside the very building the Futility Cycle mural is painted on.