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Artists Create a 1000-Year GIF Loop
jovius writes: Finnish artists Juha van Ingen and Janne Särkelä have developed a monumental GIF called AS Long As Possible, which loops once per 1000 years. The 12 gigabyte GIF is made of 48,140,288 numbered frames, that change about every 10 minutes. They plan to start the loop in 2017, when GIF turns 30 years old. "If nurturing a GIF loop even for 100 — let alone 3,000 years — seems an unbelievable task, how much remains of our present digital culture after that time?", van Ingen said. The artists plan to store a mother file somewhere and create many iterations of the loop in various locations — and if one fails, it may be easily synchronized with, and replaced by, another.
Maybe they should use FLIF instead.
BFD. Displays of sequential numbers, or randomly generated pixels that have no interest except to "contemporary ahhtists".
If it's representative of "our present digital culture", 47 million of the frames must be porn.
Was there a contest somewhere for 'Wasting Your Time In the Least Meaningful Way'? If so, these people win first place.
The dreary time of the year - September to June. But look on the bright side. Finns can make animated GIFs. And that IS Juh not Gih. Crazy Canadians.
Pretty impressive uptime
By then we should be colinizing other solar systems
The goal of conceptual art isn't to create. It's to give an explanation to something stupid.
Who cares if it's a GIF that loops every 1000 years? Why not a series of setTimeouts that loops every 1000 years? Or every million years? Or every 20 billion years? Why is the limitation of the GIF relevant? Why is the anniversary of the GIF relevant? Because as long as there's some explanation, however idiotic, it's conceptual art.
Gee I hope these people can keep their nonsensical time delayed program code going for 1000 years.
Not.
The famous Westinghouse sign in Pittsburgh that went through permutations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Another animated GIF i can steal and put up on my animated GIF geocities website! Aha, i miss the 90's
Get the damned gif, change the frame rate and I am going to see how it all ends and post the spoiler all over the net. Ha, Ha, Ha...(-- Evil laughter while caressing a docile white cat)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The 10 minute change time was presumably chosen because they generated 48,140,288 frames. Why 10 minutes? Why not 100 years, or 1 second? Why not random? Obviously they are procedurally generating the frames anyway. Why can't artists be more like engineers? Why can't engineers get grants for doing this kind of thing that would take them 10 minutes with Linux and a few shell scripts?
1,000 Years are 525,960,000 minutes, i.e. 52,596,000 10-minutes
According to TFS, the thing has 48,140,288 Frames, one of which is displayed ever 10 minutes.
So they seem to be 4,455,712 frames short of having it actually take 1000 years to complete. ...artists... what a meta-failure.
That's 85 years.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
A numeric display that increments at a fixed interval and periodically restarts its sequence? I didn't realise my $5 K-mart digital clock was considered art.
The concept if very interesting, however the actual GIF could have been a little more creative than just a counter.
The Long Now is a far better project than a GIF with slowly increasing numbers. Heck, Arthur Ganson's "Machine with Concrete" is better, and covers the same idea.
If they had made the GIF a 1000 year movie of non-trivial content, then it might be far more interesting. But then, "The Clock" movie which covers 24 hours is brilliant and would be hard to surpass for density of ideas.
48M frames would be about 550 hours of footage at 24 frames per second. That's multiple lifetimes worth of output for a prolific movie maker. So it's unlikely that you could really produce that many frames -- even ones that aren't that different one from the next, as you would have in a normal movie.
How about something more tractable and interesting? How about "Swan Lake" at 1/100th speed (inspired by David Michalek's "Slow Dancing")? How about a basketball game at 1/100th speed? How about time-lapse of something even slower, like a simulation of geological weathering? And those are just off the top of my head. A sequence of numbers? To celebrate GIF? Can't we do better?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I'm sure that XKCD has already done an extended image comic which updates every hour, and has something interesting on each frame rather than just having an auto-incrementing number.
In a thousand years the human species will have left this rock and colonized the Universe! Who's going to be left to see it??
Usually I try to find a silver lining in projects like this -- generally it seems stupid, but perhaps there is some aspect that is novel, interesting (or better yet) technically complicated. In this case, I'm having a real hard time coming up with anything. Creating a movie that counts from 1 to 48148288 with one frame every 600 seconds and exporting to an animated GIF -- seems like something even a novice could figure out in about 2 hours with ffmpeg. Perhaps I'm just missing the artist mentality.
GIF? Pah! APNG is where it's at. What would the people in the year 3015 think of us?
The long, slow, uncreative .gif file is only a tiny part of this project. The biggest piece of the project is the commentary about whether it is art, created by all of us after being manipulated by the artist into doing so. The artist's contribution to the whole work was his ability to get media attention for his project and to generate something so uncreative, even unartistic in the traditional sense, so lacking in required practice or skill, that it would surely get the ball rolling on the comments.
In this, my one comment, I have done more work than the "artist" did for the whole project.
It's interesting how someone's small waste of time can be snowballed into a collectively huge waste of time by so many others.
THAT is ART, and I am pleased to have been allowed a chance to contribute to the project.
That's just 18 days worth of video at 30 fps. You'd think that they could have done something more interesting with that than a counter.
Does FLIF even support animated graphics?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Easy. Nothing.
As someone else has said: "The tragedy about our culture is that our cars break apart after ten years, yet our waste remains for decades or even centuries to come".
Most of the digital "assets" we have (photos, videos) will be gone in a couple of years. Lost in hard-drive crashes, failed migrations or obsolescence of technology.
Most of them were crap anyway. Those that you want to preserve: better make B/W prints...
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
"Stuff that matters"....indeed.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Sadly this kind of crap passes for art. What happened to people actually making things with their hands?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There is a naked lady at the end.
I generally don't hear much about the Finnish people, one way or the other - hopefully this blight on the eyes won't be their legacy.
#DeleteChrome
I have written a program that runs for(;;).
Now we have to support this awful file format for another thousand years!
...in minutes. Big effin deal! Why is this lame shit showing on the feed?
I'm sure glad they did that so I don't have to. Now every child can go to sleep with a full belly tonight.
Pretty sure the last frame is a jump scare.
Download it from Centurylink.
I would comment more but I have yet to finish watching it.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
More like dumb-asses create useless piece of crap.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Was just working out the security implications of nested LOOP in MNG yesterday. A 4-billion-frame MNG could be described in a few kilobytes. Start with a 16-million-color 4096x4096 PNG, which MNG can describe with a couple of loops (I've done that but don't have the MNG handy right now), then put that inside 4096-iteration loops that shift the result by 1 row and by 1 column and a 256-iteration loop that fades the entire thing by reducing the alpha by 1 unit each iteration. Use a framing rate of 4/second and it ought to run 1000 years. Assuming MNG has caught on by the time the animation needs to start.
CAPTCHA: Naively
what a retarded waste of electricity and time. this is worthless. it means nothing, it does nothing. its just stupid and Slashdot is even more retarded for putting it on their news feed.
you might as well write up a story about how a many holding an ipad in his left hand, turns on a water tap with his right hand and proceeded to record it for 33 seconds and put it on youtube.
get this stupid shit OFF Slashdot and put it up somewhere that doesn't matter like reddit. or retarddit.
Just fire up any MAC running OSX and wait for it to crash.
One thousand years? No Problem!
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
...a Comcast download simulator.
Table-ized A.I.
Why is Slashdot news always so far behind?
It belongs back in 1995 and has no place being used for anything anymore. Use a real fucking format. I mean it's no wonder it's 12 GB, If this had been a Webm it would've compressed into a couple MB easily.
In a very low-res font. That don't impress me much.
Pretentious? Moi?
Then GIF is pretty much the worst encoding mechanism to use. Yeah, I know it's "art" or "pretentious wankery", but it's a poor showcase of technology.
Here's the Amstrad CPC 464 BASIC version (I should RENUM it). This has far far far denser information encoding. Yeah, I know the font is different. Maybe the font is the entire point of this piece of art.
10 N = 1 : REM 40-bit floating point number - probably should use a few integer numbers instead to ensure the count works properly - exercise left to the reader
20 GOSUB 100
30 EVERY 30000 GOSUB 100 : REM 50 Hz counter * 60 seconds * 10 minutes
40 GOTO 40
100 CLS
110 LOCATE 20, 12 : REM We could do something about the length of the number to centre it better
120 PRINT N
130 N = N + 1
140 RETURN