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

Re:Let me be the first to point out

[Anonymous Coward]

Science starts with something complicated and tries to make it simple.
Art starts with something simple and tries to make it complicated.

You don't understand art.

[mark_reh]

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.