Gavin Shapiro, also known as shapiro500, is a New York-based digital artist and motion designer who creates surrealist, seamlessly looping 3D animations. His work pairs cartoonish, recurring bird characters with elaborate mathematical and technical puzzles, built as loops with no beginning or end.,He began his career in motion graphics for The Onion in 2009, later working in New York, Paris and Osaka before entering the NFT space in mid-2020.,
Shapiro's recurring characters began as penguins before he shifted to flamingos at the request of the musician Yung Bae, who wanted flamingo visuals for his tour, becoming part of his aesthetic for several years. He later returned to penguins, using the birds to tell “universal human stories without using a human subject”.His influences include Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and M.C. Escher, as well as the artists Andreas Wannerstedt and Olafur Eliasson.,
His speculative zoetrope works imagine impossible physical structures: Museum Zoetrope is presented as the world's only first-person zoetrope, sited in the Antarctic Peninsula, where visitors ride a motorized car past forty sequential frames of a four-second animation.VLZ (2022), short for Very Large Zoetrope, imagines a 777-foot metal structure in Taos, New Mexico, with 30 penguins that complete one revolution per minute at dawn and dusk.For Two Zoetropes he paired a motorized Collector's Zoetrope with a free, 3D-printable Mass Market Zoetrope, releasing both on Nifty Gateway with additional editions on the Tezos platform Hic Et Nunc.
His series Wingin' It used a scavenger hunt to reveal its rarest, single-edition piece, and paired a QR-triggered NFT pamphlet on Hic Et Nunc with physical pamphlets distributed to five galleries in Paris, New York, Montreal, Atlanta and Miami.In Power vs Meaning (2023), inspired by the line “Modernity is a deal: Humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power” from Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus, he sold two looping animations, Power and Meaning, each in an edition of 8, letting collectors choose between a piece offering ongoing utility and one that was simply art.In 2024 his work was shown at the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the exhibition I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that, alongside artists including Bill Viola and Mario Klingemann.
