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.

Comments

Let me be the first to point out

[Anonymous Coward]

BFD. Displays of sequential numbers, or randomly generated pixels that have no interest except to "contemporary ahhtists".

Re:Let me be the first to point out

[esonik]

My feeling is that artists provide a creative source of "noise" and crazy ideas that are critical for breakthroughs. Such kind of out-of-the-box thinking is heavily sought after in the scientific community. Science really needs sometimes a "mutation" of ideas to make the next big leap. Just throwing money at a problem will give you only incremental small steps of improvement. Ideas are the most important ingredient for scientific breakthrough.
Therefore I encourage scientists to expose themselves to art and I also value artists' contributions although many of them don't make sense (to me).

Re:Let me be the first to point out

[Joce640k]

...and once every ten minutes? Jeez.

I've got some funny cat GIFs that would play for a million years if I only change the image once per millennium. Can I have my prize for being clever?

Re:Let me be the first to point out

[fisted]

What's outside the box here? They're well within the box of the GIF spec

So...

[minkowski76]

Was there a contest somewhere for 'Wasting Your Time In the Least Meaningful Way'? If so, these people win first place.

Can't we do better?

[pz]

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?