Dennis Richter: Serial Loops

German designer, 3D artist and musician Dennis Richter started the Serial Loops project for his master degree in Media Design at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz, exploring the comeback of GIF, how post-modern serial artworks might look like and if a more serious type of content has the potential to become viral nowadays and overcome the cute puppies and funny cats mania invading social media.

Often realistic, bold and ironic, his animated creations currently catching online attention (view the reactions to one of his most popular works, ‘The Jesus Factory’) present a critical approach to the social and political issues of today, while also reflecting human beliefs, addictions and false hopes in a world governed by consumerism and materialism, where even holiness turns into a product in the factory line, by deception as a result of the illusion we build around us, and by a continuous obsession with power and control.

We see Jesus put on a cross in an automatic machine-driven process captured in an endless loop, an unreachable heaven, so far away that it rather acts as an unfulfilled promise, a horrid representation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as references to a culture of surveillance, quite unsettling in the image of the panopticon. This repetition of elements follows the logic of the consumerist society, but also highlights the pressure of being watched at all times, of limited freedom and imminent danger. The alternative to this state of alienation and misguided faith is yet to be found. Distinguishing between real and fabricated may be the first step to constructive disobedience.

‘The Jesus Factory’ (HD version here). The animation was built within open source software blender 2.77 and makeHuman. Just 60 single frames were used to make this loop run seamless.

‘Heaven Far’

‘The Christmas Factory’

‘The Hellfire Factory’ (HD version here) / An AGM-114 Hellfire missile hung on the rail of an US Air Force MQ-1L Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is inscribed with, “IN MEMORY OF HONORABLE RONALD REAGAN.”

‘Merkel 16’

‘Radioactive’

‘The Pill Factory’

‘Camera POV’

‘PanoptiCon’

‘No Go’

• •

More info on Behance.