There is more to the world of street art than Banksy’s works, and our street art section here strives to continuously prove it. One of the best things about street art, as I’m sure many of its fellow fans will agree, is the way in which it integrates a social message into its literal, esthetic form. No longer was art something for the elites, something abstract and often hard to decode; the moment art descended into the streets, it became a fun and quirky and emotional way of getting a message across loud and clear. It is a form of art which is made by the masses for the masses.

Of course, a street artist isn’t really an average person in terms of skill and talent and training and means, as it takes years and hard work to be able to get that good. (Except for stencils which are way easier to produce if you have a neat idea and some basic know-how.) But in spite of the artist’s exceptionality, he or she usually does not dissociate from the general population as far as feelings go. As a general rule of thumb, upon admiring a piece of street art, you always feel that it is made by a son or daughter of “the people”, as corny and cliché as that might sound. Perhaps the air of defying something – as street art is still theoretically forbidden and viewed as vandalism in many parts of the world and many areas of most cities – contributes to the social meaning and the feeling of togetherness with the whole of us. In any case, street art is always imbued with a higher social meaning than most classic art, and it always keeps up with the trends and realities of everyday life, by playing with some of the common places in popular culture and so on.

Digital culture was, until recently, something approached by street art only by attempting to imitate pixels or make references to outdated computer games or characters which most adults would be nostalgic for today (like Mario or Pac-Man, for instance). But a more recent trend has taken the fusion of street art with the digital world even further, creating something even more expressive than the regular version of street art. Making GIFs out of street art is the next best thing, and various sources all over the great wide web are doing it with various degrees of creativity and success. There are a few hubs where you can find street art gifs centralized and even grouped into themes.

For example, you can find a Tumblr blog entirely dedicated to Banksy’s works made into gifs here. The person behind the ABVH nickname is unmistakably putting in a lot of his own work and time and skill to create these animated and improved versions of Bansky’s creations. Therefore, it is quite debatable if we’re not talking about an artistic act in itself here with the GIF-making. That’s the great thing about both street art and digital culture: the usual boundaries and borders and blurred, inspiration can be taken from anywhere and the art itself belongs to everybody.

Another great example is this French site of animated graffiti art, which produces and publishes results best described as psychedelic. Not as socially charged as our previous example, but still visually compelling and fascinating nonetheless. After browsing these two suggestions, don’t stop here, by all means. We only included two for the sake of not writing a too lengthy post, but the internet is full of wonderful examples of street art gone digital into awesome gifs. Have fun browsing and drop us a line to tell us what you think of this trend.