general

Above are screenshots of Google's search page today, from WIZARDISHUNGRY. The dancer moves from right to left in this animated middlebrow magazine illustration. These are not GIFs, of course, I assume its HTML5 and/or canvas. Some commentary, from twitter:

tommoody: some bad interpretive dancing and anti-aliasing happening on Google's main search page right now

tommoody: if god had wanted drawings to be anti-aliased he would never have made pixels rectangular

WIZARDISHUNGRY: v: i dont understand why they didnt just use an animated gif instead of flipping thru '150 divs with a png in each / jw: @tommoody / v: fuuu

WIZARDISHUNGRY: The compositing artifacts in today's Google sketch are fugly bullshit; too cool for a gif? http://yfrog.com/gz6gi4j @tommoody

tommoody: Google means to phase out animated GIFs and replace them with this crap: http://yfrog.com/gz6gi4j (thx @WIZARDISHUNGRY for pic)

petcortright: i want my google back

Update: Coda: "Horserace in Airport Scanner, Take 4" (hat tips GucciSoFlosy, vokoda)

Ryder Ripps made a point about GIFs in response to this post by Julia Kaganskiy:

Just to clarify, GIFs are simply short animations.

Animation has been considered an art form for a while now.

Unless we are discussing the inherent technical qualities of a GIF,,,,

such as the fact they have a 256 color limit,,,,

the various types of dithering that are used (noise, pattern, diffusion)

the fact that they have no standardized frame rate and furthermore much discrepancy browser to browser,,,

unless we are talking about these inherent qualities I think its important that we consider GIFs as just another format for animation. Like any tool or material, its function often dictates its form.

Yet, like it or not, GIFs also imitate photography and cinematography rather well and are the perfect medium for lightweight, browser-independent, non-Flash clippings from mainstream TV, movies and YouTubes. For most people GIFs will not connote the hard line position Ripps describes (a medium concerned with its own inherent qualities) but will be funny "three frame" versions of popular culture, etc. This makes it harder for the GIF avant garde and and more likely they will encounter reactionary complaints from other artists but being a Pop artist wasn't always a tall glass of Coca Cola (TM) either.

This is a snippet from a longer comment by Sally McKay, hopefully it's OK to take out of context:

Something I like about so-called remix culture is that participants are artists & viewers at the same time, so the artworld hierarchies and power structures carry way less weight. Unlike relational aesthetics projects in art galleries — where the participants basically just provide the anonymous person-power to manifest the famous artist's idea — GIFs exist in a culture with different stakes, where authorship is not always an important contextual feature. Sometimes authorship is important, especially when GIF artists build up an oeuvre, and that's cool too. Because the same GIF can live in multiple online contexts (forums, blogs, artists' archival pages, etc), the whole practice is nice and fluid.

m.river, responding to another aspect of McKay's comment (that his work was "techno-utopian"--read the whole thread), says that, in making a particular artwork in the late '90s, he had an "...interest in the ability for people to exchange/ share/ modify/ delete an artwork within a network environment. It was a way to say that an internet, or any digital artwork for that matter, could be an active rather than passive object. It was, and is, about a relation of active viewers and active artist."

In an email, Michael Manning says that he doesn't necessarily agree with

the argument that in 1997 networked art really worked in a remix culture fashion. Perhaps images were transferred and could be modified, however most classic net.art is pretty passive in the sense [that] although you may be interacting with the site or work (say Shulgin's 'Form Art'), the user isn't really creating anything as they experience it and if they are, the terms of that creation are dictated by the original artist instead of you posting a GIF to dump then me saving it and doing whatever I want with it. I guess some of the BBSs and some of Bunting's stuff had participation, but it was still under the guise of some type of pre-decided control put in place by the artist, again not really collapsing producer/viewer all that much. Almost like web based version of gallery relational aesthetics.

After much shouting and name-calling (mostly with me on the receiving end, sorry to say), Will Brand has revised this statement:

The preference for GIF as a medium, it seems to me, has nothing to do whatsoever with its compression algorithms, a teensy bit to do with the retro appeal of a limited color palette, and a whole lot to do with the fact that - as the very existence of your remix culture indicates - it's so easily interchanged.

He now understands that many artists prefer GIFs for their funky compression algorithms (what John Michael Boling called "the elegance in an appropriately used dither"), the minimal, de stijl-like appeal of a limited color palette (whether or not it is retro), and somewhere further down the list, ease of remixing (since, after all, the first attempts at "art" GIFs existed long before a SocMed "remix culture").

It was rough, but I finally got him to publicly agree with me.

Update, July 2011: This is an ironic post. I don't think I would ever say that someone "publicly agrees with me"--it has a bit too much of a "smell the glove" ring to it. Nor does WB actually agree with me--he still maintains that interchange trumps graphics in the GIF acronym. Was just inverting his words out of annoyance with the linked-to post.