Interview with Wavegrower (Frédéric Vayssouze-Faure)
Wavegrower (Frédéric Vayssouze-Faure) is one of the great gif artists of what could be called the ‘Tumblr’ era of gif art from about 2011-2017. His work is ubiquitous and his influence on gif artists today is profound. He took the time to answer questions I sent him and apologized for his English (which is lucid and clear) and the lack of new work (I am deeply grateful for the beautiful work he has already given us).
Note: He includes many examples with links, Make sure to follow them!
I'm from France.
Were you educated in the arts?
I'm self-educated in art in general, and music theory in particular. As a former engineer I studied math in a quite high level, what brought me to be aware of the beauty of structures and correspondences : what is common between this and that, why does this sound or look better than that, what is a piece made of : layers, patterns...
Where do you live now?
I live in the city of Cahors, France.
What do you do for a living?
I'm a math teacher, also getting few royalties for animations I've made for a mobile app.
Why did you start making gifs?
I started making gifs when discovering the existence of Tumblr and the work of David Szakaly a.k.a. dvdp in 2014. GIF appeared to be a good format to develop an audience and continue my own creative coding work in a new direction.
Why do you continue to make gifs?
Actually I've just had a one year break because of a professional exam I've prepared and passed. Nevertheless I've continued to make gif from 2014 to 2018 for the reason I never felt to get out of inspiration and progress. Getting many followers and positive feedback also pushed me to carry on.
How has your approach to gif making evolved?
First I've learnt to deal with gif format specificities to get the best results in terms of file size, which is the major limitation for web displaying. I also gradually made my code evolve and grow to enrich my potentialities through the use of 3D, inheritance, recursivity, fractals, noise... It has made my pieces getting more and more deep, full, complex. This is a constant evolution you can see in the archive page of my blog.
What tools do you use to create your gifs?
I use Processing to code and render png frames, then Gimp to optimize and make it a gif.
How has that evolved?
Before doing gifs, I was making animations in flash/actionscript. Then I started to use Maya/MEL to deal with 3D. One day a popular gif artist called p5artand coding with Processing reblogged a gif of mine, thinking it was made that way. Many Processing coders started to follow my blog. So I tried to remake the piece with that language, in the idea of sharing the code to show gratitude. Then I realized it was very best suited for what I intended to do (basically making innumerable dots move in harmony the way I want) and started to built a growing personal tool for this, taking advantage of Object-oriented programming which allows in particular to group elements and easily apply to them the same transformations you can apply to one of them (concretely putting a loop inside a loop).
Why is looping important?
Looping is just fundamental, so deeply part of our world that we don't even mention it. It is related to many other words which describe the same phenomenon : wave, pulsation, cycle, rhythm, oscillation, vibration, beating, spin, undulation, frequency... Mathematically speaking, its all about periodic functions (returning to the same value every time) and above all the sine function, smoothest cyclic motion ever, from which every other can be generated by summation with multiple frequencies (Fourier theory). Looping is everywhere in real life : breathing, heart beating, walking, swimming, love making, wing flapping, baby rocking, ripples, wind in trees, day and night, seasons, planets orbit and spin, sound at many levels (rhythm , frequencies, structures), light, ... I guess that's why contemplating or experimenting a loop make you feel something. Looping being at the heart of my code (the first Class I coded was called Oscillator) and then at the heart of my work, that explain why many people find my gifs relaxing, especially people who do stimming, like autist people, from which I've got a positive feedback.
How have you seen gifs change since you started making them?
I'm not a gif pioneer so gifs haven't changed so much since I started I guess. Maybe gif art got a bit out of the underground this past years through the expansion of social media featuring gif artists, review from art blogs and gif art festivals.
Do you think gifs are a unique art form?
Gif can be seen as a medium encompassing many different styles and art form (generative, cinemagraph, glitch, vaporwave, surrealism, minimalism, ...), but for me it's an art form by itself regarding its own characteristics, which make it unique at several levels. First regarding the way people experience it : easy to share, fast to display, light, autolaunching, autolooping, simple as haikus but with a high attractivity in many different potential ways : mindblowing, mesmerizing, relaxing, clever, funny... The fact that it loops is also major, making gifs very pleasant to watch with a musical background, especially when tempos match, and letting the viewers take the time they want to be penetrated and aware of every details and questioning.
Technically speaking it also has constraints that every gif artist has to deal with and share with other gif artists, and which may influence the art process, in particular to be as light as possible for a fast displaying, requiring to evaluate the cost of every frame, taking into account that in gif format every pixel which stays the same from on frame to another is counted for one. An interesting challenge may be then to produce long looping gifs that remain light (like this one or that one).
Another important feature that gif artists share is the perfect loop requirement, not easy to achieve, and leading to clever tricks which make gifs seem to be longer than its real loop period (like this one). For me, unless there is a good reason, a gif that doesn't perfectly loop is not a proper one. And I'm very fond and impressed by cinemagraph artists who make perfect looping animations from movies or nature.
