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Artists Create a 1000-Year GIF Loop

Posted by timothy on from the loading-loading-loading dept.

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.

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Yawn... This was more interesting 50 years ago by david.emery · · Score: 3, Informative

    The famous Westinghouse sign in Pittsburgh that went through permutations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    1. Re:Yawn... This was more interesting 50 years ago by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 3, Informative

      A better comparison is made in TFA to the musical piece by John Cage called As Slow As Possible. While initial performances were for a half hour or hour, some crazy people decided to build an organ in Germany and plan a performance that will last over 600 years. (The next note will change in 2020.) And then you have stuff like stretching out a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to 24 hours without pitch distortions, which was vaguely interesting over a decade ago.

      At least these previous projects had a goal of taking a preexisting artwork and pushing it to its limits. When such things were first done, it at least brought up philosophical musings about the perception of time and artworks. I'm not sure what this adds or what the novel achievement is here other than "watch me program an image file that changes slowly."

  2. Only 85 years short... by fisted · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    That's 85 years. ...artists... what a meta-failure.

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