[NetBehaviour] an unpublished interview about animated gifs

[curt at lab404.com]

I was interviewed for an article on animated gifs, but nothing I said ever made it into the article. 

Here is the article (in three parts, in Spanish) by Pilar Díez: 
http://www.notodo.com/tecno/web/3574_gifmondo_i_pxel_nivel_dios.html
http://www.notodo.com/tecno/formatos/3587_gifmondo_ii_la_dicha_en_movimiento.html
http://www.notodo.com/tecno/formatos/3596_gifmondo_iii_la_gran_traca_final.html

Below is the interview.

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>> I'm working on an article which is going to be called GIFmondo and it's about recent GIF art bloom and, although I know your artistic work is not mainly based on pure GIF format development, I have notice that you are involved with this topic. When did you really started to do it? Why?
> 
> I use gifs in my web art. I have a site called playdamage.org that I started around 2001. It's not just single animated gifs. It's usually several animated gifs that are tiled, stretched, and stacked on top of each other using HTML and CSS code. Animated gifs can be transparent, so you can see through parts of them to what is beneath them. Also, png-24 images can be semi-transparent. So you can begin to "stack" layers of gifs on top of each other, creating a kind of animated collage.
> 
> My original, self-imposed restrictions for playdamage were that each page could be no  fatter than 250K. So with this restriction, video was out of the question. Animated gifs are great because you can get a lot of impact out of them in terms of motion, but they download very quickly. Also, they are kind of like micro-cinema, like early forms of cinema (kinetoscopes, etc.), before there was Hollywood cinema. So animated gifs force you to be minimal and focus on small moments or events rather than a larger story. In this sense, they are more like animated paintings than they are like videos.
> 
> Here is a group animated gif project I started around 2000. http://playdamage.org/quilt/
> This one does use discrete, single gifs (as quilt squares).
> 
> 
>> GIF art or net.art looks to have not only a format dilemma or trend but also a matter of size, position and way of showing the pieces. It looks to have its own laws and rules. Do you consider GIF art or net art could be an art itself such as painting, sculpture... for this reason?
> 
> Yes, gifs are a their own medium. Gif art and net art are not the same thing. You can make net art without ever using gifs, and you can project gifs on the wall in a gallery without being on the internet. Even single gifs are different than the gif collages that I make at playdamage.
> 
> 
>> Do you recognize a net art scene or a specific GIF art scene? Do you think is or will be a trend on art? How do you see the present of net art? Do you think this conditions (scale, size...) are essential matters or topics for any net artist? Do you feel like internet is the museum of your work or do you consider other (more physical, less ethereal or virtual) ways of exhibition?
> 
> There is a resurgent interest in animated gifs associated with Olia Lialina and a kind of lo-res/retro fetishization of the early internet. This has to do with cheezy, kitsch gifs that are either found on the internet, or "original" gifs created in this cheezy style.
> 
> Then there are communities like dump.fm that use found and original gifs to participate in a kind of visual dialogue (gif as glyph).
> 
> Then there are other artists like Francois Gamma who make really beautiful, complex original gifs that don't have anything to do with crappy early internet gifs. Since gifs are RSS-able (re-bloggable), you get group photoblog cultures (surf clubs, computers club) that reblog and aggregate the original animated gifs of their members.
> 
> playdamage.org doesn't really fit in with any of these cultures, because I'm not creating any single, stand-alone animated gif just for itself. The gifs I make are meant to be used in conjunction with page layout code in order to make a larger collage; but you can't really re-blog these entire screens (you can just link to them). Whereas any single animated gif can be re-blogged or tumblr'd indefinitely. So in that sense, the group photoblog (or blog, or tumblr) becomes like an online gallery. You are not merely posting a jpg snapshot of an offline painting. When you re-blog the gif, you are presenting the actual, original artwork right there on your blog.
> 
> As far as formal conditions of the medium, it is just cell animation. You could use the same techniques and then export your animation from photoshop to a quicktime movie instead of an animated gif. Some people make really fat gifs (that exceed 10 MB). But tumblr won't let you post such large gifs. So if you want to participate in the re-blog gif culture, you can't just make a huge, fat gif. So the bandwidth constraints of the network still force the gifs to be minimal.
> 
> 
>> If you don't mind, could you tell me about other .GIF or net artists who you like and why?
> 
> artists (old and new):
> http://toliademidov.ru/crash/
> { http://fontgraphic.jp/2004/zx26green/index.html * http://web.archive.org/web/20040410092131/http://www.fontgraphic.com/zx26/index_tes.html }
> http://www.computersclub.org/club/?author=15
> http://pandaclock.com/phantom_hand/?cat=11
> http://antlerswifi.com/
> I like them because their work is pretty and cool!
> 
> My favorite gif artist is Katie Bush:
> http://lovekatie.com/
> http://destroyevil.com/
> She is great because she does fullscreen collage work that critiques capitalism in a surreal, disturbing, hilarious way.
> 
> and this is a great gif gallery:
> http://ani-gif.com/about/

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