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Working on new tessellating animated gif tiles led me to revisit my older tile experiments, and repurpose for website backgrounds. I originally made these animated mosaics in Macromedia Flash 8 for my section of the feature film The Prophet.

I tried recreating the mosaics in Moho, but quickly became frustrated. Moho’s masking is very unlike Flash’s; in fact Moho’s everything is very unlike Flash’s, and where Flash excels at this type of mechanical construction, Moho favors the organic. Rather than figuring it out anew, I fired up the ol’ 2007 PowerMac and dug into my old ...

I’ve been collaborating with Alex Gleason on a new social media website, and he proposed a background of the animated fish from Seder-Masochism:

But how to scale it up for a full background? The gif above is 1.6 MB, it can’t be any larger without significantly slowing loading times (and eating up data on mobile devices). I thought I could maybe make a tessellating animated gif tile, and so did Alex, but it turned out to be much trickier than I’d anticipated.

In a way, a looping gif is a tessellation of time: it seamlessly begins ...