Artists Made This Giant Gif That Can Be Seen With Satellites

Artists don't usually have access to satellite imagery to help them in their creations.

But when a British artist was given that chance, the result was a massive gif cobbled together from photos taken from space.

INSA, as he calls himself, is the brains behind the gigantic project, which is really a large-scale version of an "gif-iti," an art form he pioneered.

"Gif-iti is an idea that I came up with," INSA explains in a video about the project.

"I paint a wall, take a photo, repaint a wall, take a photo, do this until I've got a smooth motion to then upload these images into a computer, make them into an animated gif."

Here's an example of what that looks like, made by INSA himself:

ACAB well maybe not All, Most- MCAB........ Another close up of the 'Cycle Of Futility' piece???????? #acab #mcab #INSA #gifiti #gif #28redchurchstreet #DownloadTheApp

A video posted by insa_gram (@insa_gram) on Oct 15, 2014 at 6:15am PDT

Thanks to the 576 manhours provided by whiskey maker Ballantine's (yes, the video is essentially a cool ad), INSA was able to create gif-iti over 154,774 square feet of ground in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - that's more than two and a half football fields - just across a marina from one of the city's airports.

The area was painted and repainted, while two Pleiades satellites 431 miles above the earth took an image on each of four days. Put together, the result is this vibrant, pulsating patchwork of yellow and pink hearts, a recurring image in INSA's art.

Ballantine's approached INSA about large-scale ideas he might have in mind. "I said I want to paint something big enough to be seen from space and to animate it," the artist told Mashable.

The colossal project resulted in the most sprawling gif of INSA's collection, big enough that satellites can clearly see it from space with a little zoom action. Pretty impressive!

For more of INSA's gif-iti, you can check out his Tumblr page dedicated to the novel art-form. He also shared his own version of the "space gif-iti", as seen below, on his Instagram.

So here is the actual GIF captured by satellite 431miles away in space! ?????????????????????????? Press play ?? 57,515 square meters painted over 4 days Its takes the earth 24 hours to do one revolution- that was the time we had between shots to paint each layer........ Watch the process: @Ballantines_Official Presents INSA's Space GIF-ITI' here -youtube.com/Ballantines Link in Profile #BiggestOnThePlanet #NextLevel #StayTrue

A video posted by insa_gram (@insa_gram) on Jan 23, 2015 at 6:41am PST