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Enter a Cyber Trance with This Warped and Looping GIF Series

Look inside the warped and looping GIF artwork of 29th Floor, a.k.a., Daniel McFarland.
Total Protonic Reversal

29th Floor is the creative alias of one Daniel McFarland, a Philadelphia-based digital artist who's into lucid dreaming and “spy stuff,” and hates both printers and their damned printer ink. He's worked as a creative in music and web design/development since 1995, but it's his recent avalanche of warped and looping animated GIFs that are providing us with today's wonders.

Using a combination of Cinema 4D, Processing, After Effects, and Photoshop, McFarland creates a full range of animated shapes, textures, and movements. His GIF creations variously oscillate, flicker, bounce, stretch, glitch, and move in amorphously liquid ways.

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McFarland's piece OKTOGO, for instance, features a digital torso with an orb of mercury-like—but translucent—liquid suspended around a head. Seamless as it is, the loop has a science fictional quality, as though it were a reservoir of action for an interplanetary traveler.

In KING CANDY, McFarland again goes globular with a piece of gelatinous pink candy that pulsates incessantly for reasons unknown. Things get even glitchier with HOTHOLE, a grid pattern which looks like it's being overtaken by some form of mysterious digital static.

McFarland creates something like a self-assembling robot with SUSSIDIO, which doesn't seem like an homage to the famous Phil Collins' song of the same name, but we probably shouldn't dismiss the notion entirely. Maybe he was rocking that track while creating this particular GIF.

McFarland also proves that he can go highly geometric with the wave-like topography of pyramids in JAZZDRAGON, and the rising and falling micro-skyscrapers of Squarespace. Both pieces display a visual rhythm that is trance-inducing in the best possible way.

On his 29th Floor Twitter feed, McFarland mused about having Gifpop print some of his GIF art. As we saw with Joe Winograd's eye-popping lenticular prints that loop like his animated GIFs, there is no reason McFarland shouldn't give it a shot. They'd no doubt be very cyberdelic, indeed.

For more of 29th Floor's trippy animated GIFs, visit his Tumblr page or head over to GIPHY.

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