Day: March 24, 2014

An early casualty of the GIF tournament we've been discussing is this one by Scary Attack (GIFs larger than 300KB go to my "wider blog" for shelter -- this one's an ungainly 3.5 MB).
When you open it up in a GIF program you see it's 99 frames, about a third of which are blank or transparent. The frame rate is set to zero, which means in a GIF program it moves with a stroboscopic flicker. In a browser it moves at one-tenth to one-twentieth of a second, so the eye can see what's going on. And it appears rather simple: a Mondrian-style grid of blue, black, white and pink.
There are a zillion or so Mondrian-style grids on the web but my feeling is you can't have enough of them. It's an enduring form the way certain arpeggiated chords always sound good. Scary Attack makes his erratic and glitchy, kind of the opposite of the obdurate universalism of de Stijl's horizontals and verticals, more like a badly wired neon sign. The pink is something Mondrian would have self-immolated before using. The piece also has a bit of an Ad Reinhardt flavor (except for that pink): very faint sub-grids of smaller rectangles (blue on black, blue on blue) can be seen, much as Reinhardt played with low contrast adjacent values. The main appeal is something Reinhardt couldn't or wouldn't do: the constant cartoon-like intrusions of one rectangle's space into another's. This happens in an unpredictable way, with enough variation over 99 frames to keep the work engaging. Sometimes the little pink rectangles get "stepped on," which is humorously pathetic.

I disagreed with Art F City on its support of a ladder competition for GIFs.

While ArtFCity supports the neoliberal model of GIFs as mano-a-mano, "fuck your buddy" capitalist competition, complete with a ladder of winners and losers and hokey flames in the background, tommoody.us, a kinder, gentler website, announces "Operation GIF Rescue" [subsequently changed to GIF Rescue Service"], where the "losers" of these dogfights will be given deserving homes. [This comment went into moderation when I changed the URL - whoops.]

Paddy replied:

I support "Operation GIF rescue." I see the tourney as a way to get people engaged and have some fun, and pulling good gifs off the site and talking about them critically helps that cause.

Then I decided to change the name (too much like a certain pro-death organization):

Please note that the name and post title has been changed to GIF Rescue Service. Competition is not fun but rescue warms the hearts of millions.

I received one email from someone else disturbed by the "competition ladder for art" concept. Would be interested in others' commentary - please see email address on my About page. Let me know if you prefer name, initials, or anon. One of the nice things about dump.fm is that while the "fav count" can get you to the "top of the directory," hackers easily game the count and then every few months the site goes kerflooey and resets everyone to zero. All that said, "GIF Rescue Service" will also intermittently rescue dumps from the instant obscurity of "dropping off the front page" -- our editors have already been doing that for a few years, but without a public-spirited name.