art - others

Animated version on flickr

Have been saying that animated GIFs didn't so much become "corny and out of fashion" (the conventional wisdom) but rather appeared to disappear to the rank and file internet user because the big companies actively bury them. Let's add Flickr to the list. I understand GIFs can be large and you don't want to always have them using bandwidth on your front page*, but Flickr has no link such as mine above or a thumbnail to tell you that the above image is animated. You have to click through to a slide show view, which still doesn't tell you, then click one more time, to the "original" on the "all sizes" page. Many users will not burrow that far. The artist is having to resort to putting a scaled down animated version in his own comments.

hat tip to dreamyshade

*my self-imposed limit used to be about 50KB per image; it's grown to 250KB-ish due to "broadband creep." Ryan Alexander's animation is 569KB.

The "text altar" in the previous post was part of a series of text posts andrej did on dump.fm last July, a friendly/sarcastic critique of previously not-terribly-closely examined conventions that had developed on dump--in that particular case, the trope of placing objects side by side in symmetric configurations. As andrej noted in an email, "I think altars are sometimes a pretty lazy alternative to deeper aesthetic considerations--symmetry being a such a pretty and strong device." True, and some of the best altars acknowledge this by accentuating, exaggerating, or problematizing (academic word, sorry) their own symmetry. It should also be noted that "altars" or shrines are a folk-like adaptation or response to the dump software that were identified and called "altars" months (weeks? days?) after the fact. As designed by the dump founders, each "dump" is a horizontal line, like a line of chat text, that can accommodate "sentences" consisting of words, photos, webcam shots, glitter text, or gifs in any combination or size (up to 400 x 400 pixels per element). When a line reaches the right side of the browser frame it "wraps" to the next line. HTML is disabled so it is impossible to make grids such as this one, you have to work with the limitations of the line. One convention that developed early were concise symmetrical arrangements of elements that don't wrap. (They are a specialty for some dumpers such as jeanette, illalli, mirrrroring, and many others I ask not to be shot for not naming.)

^back in july andrej nailed dump altars before dump.fm/altars
in the "Dump.fm - IRL" show he exhibited an altar with a box of altars (photo: Erik Stinson)
some profaned the altar with beer (photo: Hypothete)
some of andrej's (virtual) altars
see also: lalblog

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Photo by Ceci Moss from her Rhizome.org report on the BYOB NY event last week. Projections by (clockwise from upper left corner) yours truly, Ryder Ripps, Billy Rennekamp, and Jeremy Bailey. Only Bailey is credited on Rhizome--whoops!