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Max Capacity's glitch-fueled pop art: beyond the average GIF

Max Capacity's glitch-fueled pop art: beyond the average GIF

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Max Capacity is an artist who creates animated GIFs and images from video games or VHS tape images of the 1980s or 1990s.

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Drawing from old console games and VHS tapes, artist and horror aficionado Max Capacity has created probably thousands of pieces of pixel art and kinetic animated GIFs. Mr. Capacity favors retro imagery and lines or glitches of the sort found on worn-out analog media, making viewers pay attention to what's gone wrong with the image as much as to the action inside the frame.

Max Capacity

After several years on Tumblr, Capacity has been interviewed by the site's Storyboard blog. In the video below, he describes some of his artistic sensibilities, including a penchant for distortion that makes some of his GIFs look like "watching a bad tape on an old TV, where you can't quite get the color right." Although his work wouldn't look out of place at a new media gallery, though, he cautions people not to take it too seriously. "It's more like watching a Schwarzenegger movie than going to an art gallery."