The unlikely union of street art and the digital world have produced the first Australian ‘gif-iti’ artwork across 9000 sqm of disused waterfront ground space at Port Melbourne’s Fisherman’s Wharf precinct.
Street artist Kitt Bennett and award-winning street art collective Juddy Roller collaborated on the epic installation. It took Bennett 30 days to complete using 700 litres of Taubmans All Weather paint across the industrial site — and a distinctive partnership with satellite technology, transporting the artwork into a new perspective on the digital screen.
The artist is known for his playful figurative artworks, mostly seen in Melbourne and regional Victoria, and in 2019, SBS profiled the artist in a video that amassed over three million views. His partner, Juddy Roller, are a street art agency that brings these large-scale artworks to life; best known for the Silo Art Trails and partnerships with CreativeVictoria and Festivals Australia.
Revolution depicts a sequence of a man falling through space, the distinct aimlessness of zero gravity in his hovering legs; dressed in a neon green suit, white shirt, and orange shoes. However, the street art aesthetic wakes up in the digital space, turning into a moving video, a gif—or, gif-iti.
Coined by UK street artist ISNA, a gif-iti is a term that describes the form the art makes when it takes the leap from physical to digital space. And, not only is this artwork anAustralian first — the largest artwork in the Southern Hemisphere, four times the size of the previous holder, The Adnate Hotel in Perth, at 27 storeys high — but, Bennet’s equivalent of 90 floors-worth of art becomes the world’s largest independently produced work of animated ‘gif-iti’.
The roly-poly man is a series of ten individual 30-metre-long figures; using the artist’s signature large-scale aerial mural style. “The sheer size of the project is truly unprecedented,” Juddy Roller’s founder, Shaun Hossack, shares. “Revolution is an apt title.”
Bennet saw Revolution as an opportunity to combine his passion and interests: “my childhood love of animation and my more recent fascination with painting large scale ground murals.” Often finding unorthodox surfaces to work on, this large-scale mural was one of the harder ones. “When I first looked at the site through satellite photo it looked like nice flat concrete,” Bennett explains, “but dealing with the surface up close was avery different matter… you can’t really slap a design over the top of gravel.