Here at Sound & Vision we are a big fan of GIFs. More specifically: GIFs that re-use works of art or archive content. We competed in the GIF IT UP 2015 contest with a GIF using images from Open Beelden. Earlier this year we were delighted to find the GIF masterpiece ‘Golf Trilogy’ making the rounds on social media. It tells the gory story of a well-aimed golf ball claiming an unexpected casualty:
Through the article ‘Darkly Absurd GIFs of Famous Paintings’ we discovered that its maker, Kajetan Obarski, is based in Amsterdam. Could we find him and ask him to do something simlarly creative with our archive video? We pitched the idea to him, which he reacted very positively to. We decided to meet in Amsterdam, which was a bit scary - what kind of maker is behind these violent and absurdly dark animations? As it turned out, a very friendly young man, who was open to working with us and exploring the archive for general silliness and small, interesting, animated stories.
We told Kajetan about Open Beelden, which he used to find and download the material. All of the videos on Open Beelden are available for re-use through a Creative Commons license or through the Public Domain Mark. Kajetan was very inspired by all the material and it did not take him long to re-work it into his signature style of quirky animation.
Curious to see what he made?
Check out the 3 GIFs he made at our request:
Creator: Kajetan Obarski (Kiszkiloszki). Source material: Polygoon-Profilti (producer) / Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision (curator). Licence: CC BY-SA
Creator: Kajetan Obarski (Kiszkiloszki). Source material: Polygoon-Profilti (producer) / Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision (curator). Licence: CC BY-SA
Creator: Kajetan Obarski (Kiszkiloszki). Source material: Polygoon-Profilti (producer) / Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision (curator). Licence: CC BY-SA
Check out more work of Kiszkiloszki
More GIFs?
- Check out the results of our own small GIF-a-thon where we turned Open Beelden material into GIFs
- Check out the results of the 2015 GIF IT UP contest organised by our archive friends DPLA and Europeana
- Read the blog about the impact we made with Kiszkiloszki's GIFs