GIFs were established as a free and sort of like usable part of the web.
GIFS are great because its
a low barrier entry, anyone can play around, and it's fun.
The animated GIF for us was just a photograph that can move
and existed forever. This is a photograph that is still alive and so we were
already thinking beyond the limitations of the file name.
An animated GIF is
an image that's been encoded using the graphics interchange format, where it has
multiple frames encoded into a single image file and a web browser or other piece of software
will play those images back in animated sequence automatically. The original GIF
specification came out in 1987. Early example of GIFs that
you see are flames, like flames are very popular, and the waving american flag is all
over the place. Most notoriously is the under construction GIF.
But then by the time you get to like '95/ '96, you get the release of the Netscape browser and these web browsers
that can
automatically animate them and all of a sudden you see this new spike in popularity.
But, following that, there's a sudden division between the web 1.0 of the
seventies and eighties and nineties and then web 2.0 of like the two
thousands
moving forward. So the idea of using GIFs becomes way less fashionable. But, around
2007/2008 popularity is swinging back up. People then start to
realize that you can use gifs for tons of different things. Like now that we're in 2011/
2012, there's more GIFs online but you also have
way more places to put them; things like reddit and tumblr, wordpress. Even like
twitter to a certain degree. So you're seeing actually this like post modern GIFs.
And the tools for GIF creation are becoming more widespread.
GIFs can be anything
but what unites the GIFs is that they're short and
they are something that most tumblr users can create themselves. People are sharing
more and I think tumblr definitely has a part of that. Humans really like repetition, we feel comfortable with it.
And sometimes just, the longer you watch something,
the funnier it gets or it'll actually change meanings. You have the glitch art, you have pixel art,
TV, movies, and you have stuff that you can't even
really categorize. I think it's mostly young people driving the form, definitely, because
it enhances their online persona. Just being able to make some of those,
makes you so cool. It's uncharted territory right now and
I think really anything has the possibility, the potential to be an art form
but certainly, around animated GIFs, we've seen a
transformation. We've seen them go from just people
taking tv shows. We've seen people making original stuff with them.
Mashups between videogames and movie characters and even tumblr memes. I think
there's other new
art forms waiting to be discovered in there
that we just haven't figured out yet.
So we were doing fashion editorials and that's all at magazines and things like that and the
fashion world really didn't latch on to the internet, so we wanted to push that. It
makes sense that the web is there, why put a still picture online. The
image can now move. So instead of making still pictures you would make
animated pictures and they would just go on, infinitely, forever. Everyone always describes our
work as
creepy. What's creepy about it? But our work is very playful. So, I mean, I think the two
biggest inspirations is, one, the web. We work off of memes and memes are in our work.
That they're just a kid making something funny with their friends and tossing it up
online. That's where the best memes come from, you know.
It's accidents. But besides that, video games. It lends itself to like video game
culture, like playing a game and, you know, blowing people up on the moon and slaying
dragons and things like that. It's just this idea that you could be anything and-
you can become anyone, yeah -go anywhere. I mean, these are possible in games. We get
bored really really quick and it's always about doing the next thing and
technology and it used to be that art was
in museums on walls and now, all of a sudden, with this thing of the web and art on
screens, all of a sudden, you go to to the MOMA and there's a screen with art on it. So,
we just want to be there.
I think there's opportunities with this kind of
hybrid medium to show people something they've never seen before, to have these
moments that can just exist forever. It's just like this little magical warp of time.
We can live within a moment within that moment, like to
dream of something and then create it in a camera and share it with people and let them dream with you,
just for a moment. It allows a moment to
live on and there's something kind of fascinating about that. Whatever that
one thing is that is alive is what your eye's gonna go to.
It sets the emotional impact of what the cinemagraph will be. It's a big creative decision for us, like
what moment to focus on. We have a cinemagraph called "Anna Sees Everything." She's
watching this show and it's kind of like a little portrait of her. This is what she does for a living.
So like watching the footage of Bill Cunningham, he didn't take a picture of every model that
walks by. When he
likes them and he likes it and he shoots it and when he doesn't, he doesn't and he doesn't even think about it.
So like we get to learn something in
watching somebody
for hours on end while we work on it.
We understand them.
It's so voyeuristic. You look but then you feel
like you should look away but then you can watch it and so then you can watch it some more
and it's like "ohh."
The simplicity of it, I feel, is
really beautiful and
we see it as an evolution of photography.
If you think of all the ways that photography is displayed these are areas that we want to
go into.
There's the parts of it that are alive and you can choose to engage in depth into the art or you can
choose to just glance at it and it's there as if it's a photograph.
And,
essentially something you've never seen before.
Who is for people whom like they think in GIFs, or like they almost speak in GIFs and I think once you get
to that point, yeah, sure,
it's art. The idea of art has changed.
And we've always seen what we could get away with. It's fun. When we started making these we were calling them
animated GIFs but it
was so much more than that. It's just too new and I love being a part of this at a time when
we're just figuring it out.
We should say "gif". It's not a "gif" it's a "jif". It's a "jif".
"Jif" is how I learned it first. The founder of the format of "jif", the compuserve guy- This is ancient
internet history here. -he said, "choosy developers choose jif" like the peanut butter.
We can talk about why you should say "gif" because it doesn't sound like peanut butter.
Let's find this guy. My understanding is that this guy
prefers "jif". So you gotta represent, for the creator. I say we gotta go with the
inventor of the format. Giraffics.
Everyone says "gif". It's "jif".