Weir describes this as one of his more "conceptual" pieces. "There's a conflict between the cannon, which has the sole purpose of destruction, and the soldier, whose soul is capable of both good and evil," he says. Turn-of-the-century feminist Mother Jones struck Weir as a mythic character. "She seems shrouded in mysticism, full of mischief and hidden power," he says. "She's exactly the type of person that would burst into a flock of crows." "He looks like an untrustworthy character and he's wearing an interesting hat, which looked like it should open up," Weir says of this photo of Krupp Von Bohlen. "My imagination latched onto that and took it from there." Weir layered dozens of pictures to create the nature setting envisioned by the man on the left. "The original image is this crowded, chaotic urban scene," he says. "In the middle of what looks to me like a squad of firefighters, there's this guy who's staring off into his own world. He's looking up, wishing he were somewhere else." "There are hundreds of boxing photographs in the archives and I usually skip past them, but I noticed a crack in the wall on this particular image that got me wondering about what could be going on in there," Weir says. "From there I got into the implications of a infinite boxing universes." To embellish the original photograph of an empty street, Weir pulled in a pair of pedestrians from another photo. "I saw a face in the building," he says. "The storefront is a gaping mouth, waiting for passersby to let their guard down. I had to add the pedestrians so the building would have something to destroy." Weir created subtle fog animation to set the mood for this piece. "This photograph initially stood out to me because it has such beautiful composition and really tells a story: the rubble in the foreground. The silhouetted ruins in the background. The impenetrable fog. I've read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, and Cthulhu sprang into mind as the culprit for this devastation." "This guy doesn't look like a priest but if he is, what kind of gods does he worship?" Weir says of the Russian church leader. "Could he be a pagan? He looks like a man of immense, ancient power." Kevin Weir turns vintage photos, like this portrait of a Russian royal, into expressive animated .gifs. "To me, this guy looked like he's haunted by nightmare eyeballs," Weir says. "I decided to make his nightmares come true whenever he closes his eyes." "When I looked at the building in this photograph, I saw a face," Weir says. "I wanted it to come to life."

When Photoshop wizard Kevin Weir spots a somber, 19th-century Russian man in the Library of Congress’ Flickr archive, he sees more than a black-and-white photograph: He imagines a pagan who sprouts an outraged, bestial head when nobody’s looking, then resumes his pose as a solid citizen.

That’s just one vivid vision Weir has turned into an animated GIF, part of his ongoing series of vintage images transformed into absurdist portraits for the internet age.

“I just stare at the picture for a while and things start coming to me that I want to bring to life,” he told Wired in a phone interview.

By adding a dash of dark secrets ripped from his imagination, Weir has turned animated GIFs — those blinking relics of early web imagery — into freakish, alt-history fantasies that call to mind Monty Python animations and H.P. Lovecraft’s creatures.

Weir’s not the only one doing interesting work in the formerly hackneyed medium: From classic comic books to Breaking Bad, various subjects have been reimagined as part of an ongoing animated GIF renaissance, fueled in part by the popularity of Tumblr.

“Animated GIFs in the ’90s used to be kind of hokey.”

“Animated GIFs in the ’90s used to be kind of hokey,” said Weir, who became obsessed with the looping visuals while cranking out banner ads last summer during an internship at a Los Angeles ad agency. But the technique of embedding a single image file with hidden “frames” timed to create the illusion of movement has become a promising artistic tool. “Because of faster, fatter internet pipelines,” he said, “you can create much bigger, more interesting files.”

Turned on by a friend to the Library of Congress’ royalty-free photo stream, Weir trawls the site for pictures that appear ripe for his ingenious mini-movie morph jobs, which he posts on his Flux Machine Tumblr.

“I just look for great compositions and compelling characters,” said Weir, a 23-year-old student working on a master’s degree in advertising at Virginia’s VCU Brandcenter.

To see more of Weir’s fantastical transformations, check the gallery above for antique images he’s layered with visions of gunpowder phantoms, man-eating buildings and Lovecraft-inspired monsters.