Unconscious Light: A.L. Crego's Hypnotic Loops

A.L. Crego's father is a miner. In his free time he fixes cars and motorbikes, and when Crego was small he taught him how machines work.

"I think this is a point where all my passion for loops came," he says, "because engines are loops."

The insight he took from the garage wasn't about power or wheels. An engine moves because every small part repeats in sync with every other, and the repetition is what gives the whole thing sense. He thinks about his own output the same way, hundreds of individual pieces that together make one machine. "I don't trust in big things," he says.

He was reading and writing at four or five, always telling little stories. When the first computer arrived he downloaded CorelDRAW off a torrent without knowing what it was and started painting in it. He made Movie Maker videos of friends skateboarding. None of it felt like art to him. "It's like more a pulse I have."

He never wanted to be an artist, and he'll tell you he still isn't one. "Art is decided by other people, not by me," he says. He prefers creator. When people online started calling his work art, he shrugged and figured maybe. "So I'm happily not an artist, let's say."

He tried sculpture and masonry for a year, too slow. A year and a half of photography school, unfinished. Then GIFs, and something clarified.

"This is when I realized, okay, what I want to do is not in the world. It's not in fine arts, or it's not in institution, or it's not even considered art. So this was my goal. I want to make GIF something that is worth to be in fine art."

People mocked him for it. GIFs were low quality, for memes. He agreed, and pointed out that comics were once dismissed the same way. He was working from rural Spain, no galleries, no connections, no money. "I have to do the most with the less."

There's one misreading he wants corrected. People assume he makes GIFs because he can't make photographs or video. "It's exactly the opposite. I got so bored of doing photos and videos." There was no room left in either. So he chose a format nobody valued and decided to make something big out of it.

The argument he's been making for twelve years is that the GIF is the most human format, and it starts with how memory works.

"We don't remember pictures. We don't remember three-hour videos," he says. "Our memories are GIFs, are little steps of information that we repeat in our mind, mostly without sound, and sadly not seamless loop."

The idea came out of street photography. Every time he took a picture he felt he'd captured an instant and missed the moment, the few seconds before and after that the shutter couldn't hold. So he started recording loops instead, and he draws a hard line between the two words. An instant is a photo. A moment is a GIF.

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. Making coffee is a loop. Work is a loop. The planet is a loop.

The craft is a matter of size. A GIF should be enormous in pixels and tiny in megabytes, and you can't get there by shrinking something big.

"You cannot go to the forest, take a huge tree, and put in a pot," he says. "This is not how it works bonsai. You have to grow them since the beginning. So a GIF is like a bonsai because his bigness lies on its smallness."

The canvas, he insists, is the web itself. "The audience is in the web nowadays."

Crego is a drummer, and the drums explained the GIFs to him. When you're learning a rhythm, it's miserable for everyone in the room, because it isn't seamless yet. Then one day you're in the pocket, and the same rhythm hypnotizes. He noticed motion on a screen did the same thing, when attention on the web was supposedly six seconds long.

"If there is no attention, it's impossible to make people read pieces," he says. So motion grabs the eye, and a seamless loop holds it, and what it holds a person into is something closer to meditation than to scrolling.

He has no patience for the other kind of motion, the glitch that dazzles and leaves nothing. "These kind of glitches are made to hide that there is no piece."

He VJs for two bands in Spain, triggering his own GIFs live from an MPC, and makes a series called Visual Beats in 4/4 at 100 BPM. "If a GIF is well designed and seamless," he says, "you can hear them."

The point of the repetition is that people learn by it. "Art is not to be watched, it's to be read," he says, and reading has to be taught. He uses loops to carve, GIF by GIF. He knows the tool cuts both ways. "Repetition cause erosion, too."

Ask him what his work is about and he answers immediately. "About the backstage of the unconsciousness of the people," he says. "Target is the backstage of your mind, not your eyes. Because compelling eyes and satisfying eyes is easy."

Beauty, in his view, is forgettable once you've understood it. Something else isn't. "A strong idea reinforced with a strong loop will ruin your mind for life." He knows because it happened to him, with films and beats and books, and at fourteen he decided he wanted to do that to other people.

He has evidence. On Tumblr, strangers used to write to say one of his GIFs had appeared in their dream. "Okay, it's working."

He's an atheist who loves the religious impulse in people, and he reads the web through Jung. "If Carl Jung was alive and saw the internet, he will say, ah, okay, this is the universal conscious collective." A lot of what he posts is a test to see what triggers a connection.

This is why he refuses to date his work. No Bitcoin symbols, no Pepe, no politics of the week. "When the hype is over, the piece will be over with it." "I love memes, but I don't want to be a meme."

And it's why he won't call any of it art. "We don't do art. We do pieces, little pieces. And one by one by one, like on a puzzle, we are building the image of art. But it's infinite, multilayer and hyperdimensional, so we will never have the art."

He's been making GIF art since 2014 and posting on Tumblr since 2012, which means he arrived in crypto art in 2018 already tired, five years into an argument nobody had wanted to have. He got called an emerging artist. It stung, and he can hear how that sounds.

"Maybe I am grumpy," he says. "But why I have to deny my own existence and territory?"

He leaves it there, mostly. What he'd rather talk about is the work, which he makes at a startling pace. Five to ten pieces a day, in After Effects and Photoshop, with a small set of tools he knows so well the process has stopped being a thing he thinks about. "It's like when you walk. You don't think each step." He worked slowly for years to earn that. "You have to think a lot to work less."

He has never owned a television. Music runs all day and through the night while he sleeps. His father was a metalhead, and Crego credits metal for the anger and noise in his aesthetic. Hip hop reached him through poetry, a single bar throwing off images he turns into GIFs. When he works, it's techno, for the layers.

Forty years old, a miner's son, still making little loops where there are no galleries. "I trust on time, to be honest."

Music, first. "Listen music is God for me." Every day.

Second, learn to sleep in peace. "Despite all the nightmares and things we live and injustice and blah, blah, blah, I go to bed every day in peace. That's for me my best peace."

Third, protect what made you start, the almost childish illusion of doing something without knowing where it goes. "Protect your innermost, your child motivation," he says. "One plus one plus one rather than thinking in one million."