Alex Khabbazi is animating with unusual analogue tools for their tactile, twitchy effects

Alex Khabbazi is “analogue process obsessed”. Well known for his illustrative graphic prints, the artist is now pushing his designs into as many different mediums as he can. Using a knitting machine to create animations that are cast on frame by frame, etching designs into metal plates and printing rolls of receipts to make things wobble, he is slowly making the grit and texture of analogue techniques a hallmark of his portfolio.

Alex is a firm believer in the idea that you can animate using just about anything. In particular, he is enjoys the use of atypical materials, ones that we might have initially considered too static for animation (like textiles) and making them move, stitch by stitch. “Something about this funny feeling scratches a hard to reach itch in the corner of my mind,” he says.

Each frame of the artist’s knitted moving work is individually made with his knitting machine and then compiled into stop motion, with no need for applying texture or digital overlays afterwards. As it’s a laborious process that can’t really be replicated, each frame is entirely individual — an attribute of the technique that further draws Alex in. “When it comes to the tactile feeling you get from using analogue processes, there’s no fooling the eye,” he says. “Seeing this distortion vary frame to frame creates a beautifully twitchy effect.”

Prior to his printmaking, Alex started his creative journey studying and later working as an architect. His current practice is the result of him quitting his career for what he felt was “a less boxed-in” kind of creativity. “It was a pretty wild decision at the time considering I didn’t have any real experience in graphic design,” he says. “Rebellion against boxes still guides my work today.” Unafraid to jump disciplines and go down different paths, Alex’s new animated progressions have allowed him to shift his practice even further, taking the edges of his clean graphic prints and distorting them into knitwork patterns that are almost like “the pixelation you get in old-school bitmap graphics”, he says.

Like any method for making that you push things through, there is always a process of translation — something that alters its outline and turns into something new; a moment of uncertainty, when you don’t quite know how imperfectly things are going to turn out. But, this is exactly what keeps Alex coming back to analogue methods: “It’s the smudges in print, the scratches in metal, the misplaced stitches in a knitted textile,” he ends. “That’s all part of the fun.”