Anna Taberko’s Kaleidoscopic GIFs

Anna Taberko builds loops that never resolve. The Minnesota illustrator and animator morphs flowers, seed pods and butterflies into one another in a series of kaleidoscopic animations, each one a closed circuit with no beginning worth noticing.

They are her first attempt at phenakistoscope-inspired animation — the nineteenth-century trick of drawing figures around a disc and spinning it to fool the eye into seeing movement. That origin explains the geometry: everything radiates from the centre, which is exactly what a spinning disc demands.