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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.

65 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Let me be the first to point out by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Let me be the first to point out by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    2. Re:Let me be the first to point out by esonik · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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).

    3. Re:Let me be the first to point out by ClickOnThis · · Score: 1

      Your comment is flip, but insightful. I'd put it a different way: science strives to reduce ambiguity, whereas art explores it. But they both strive to express the truth.

      --
      If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
    4. Re:Let me be the first to point out by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ...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?

      --
      No sig today...
    5. Re:Let me be the first to point out by radarskiy · · Score: 2

      The delay per frame field in the Graphic Control Extension is a 16 bit unsigned integer with units of 1/100th of a second. If you have figured out how to get an animated gif to display with frame intervals longer than 10m55s in existing viewers' code, then I suppose you really are clever.

      Let us know when you're done...

    6. Re:Let me be the first to point out by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 1

      My question is:
      When does the copyright run out on this thing?
      Now that I think about it, copyright will probably be extended well past 1000 years before 10% of this GIF even shows.
      Mickey Mouse will live forever!

      --
      You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
    7. Re:Let me be the first to point out by fisted · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

      --
      CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
    8. Re:Let me be the first to point out by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      Simple: I use my special 'millennial' GIF viewer.

      --
      No sig today...
    9. Re:Let me be the first to point out by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      I'd be impressed to see an animated GIF run for a couple of years, let alone 1000.

      Not to mention the encoding bug they introduced that'll be triggered in year 567. Then they'll have to start the whole thing from scratch.

    10. Re:Let me be the first to point out by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      Art strives to express the truth? Sure, I suppose that's what an artist might say.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    11. Re:Let me be the first to point out by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

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

      In that case, this is a failure. He started with something simple and made it...simple.

    12. Re:Let me be the first to point out by Toshito · · Score: 1

      Can I haz my prize for being clever?

      FTFY

      --
      Try it! Library of Babel
  2. What's in the picture? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    If it's representative of "our present digital culture", 47 million of the frames must be porn.

  3. So... by minkowski76 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:So... by PPH · · Score: 4, Funny

      What are we here on Slashdot? Chopped liver?

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    2. Re:So... by morethanapapercert · · Score: 2

      replying to undo mistaken moderation

      --
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  4. The Winters in Finland, Oh, Those Damn Winters! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

  5. 1000 years by rossdee · · Score: 1

    Pretty impressive uptime

    By then we should be colinizing other solar systems

    1. Re: 1000 years by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      By then people will be saying "It's been 1000 years since the start of space travel, why aren't we colonizing other solar systems?" And the scientists will try to explain, again, why it's not happening, and everybody will ignore them and make more thinkies about astronauts stranded in other solar systems.

  6. 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."

  7. Sweet by byrddtrader · · Score: 1

    Another animated GIF i can steal and put up on my animated GIF geocities website! Aha, i miss the 90's

    1. Re:Sweet by DoubleUP · · Score: 1

      This file is as large as all geocities websites put together.. plus, at 90s internet speeds, it'd probably take 1000 years to upload it :)

      --
      This sig may contain nuts.
  8. OK firing up Virtual Dub by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:OK firing up Virtual Dub by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

      Crap, I've got a PS4 so it's locked at 30fps.

      --
      Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    2. Re:OK firing up Virtual Dub by behrooz0az · · Score: 1

      there is no such thing as a max framerate for anything. You can render anything as fast as your computer let's you do it.

      --
      Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
  9. 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.

    --
    CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
    1. Re: Only 85 years short... by LordKronos · · Score: 2

      As I just mentioned in another post, I believe the spec has a 16 bit value allowed for frame delay in hundredths of seconds. That makes the max frame delay approximately 10.9 minutes. I presume the 10 minutes quoted in the article us just someone rounding to a nice sounding number

    2. Re: Only 85 years short... by fisted · · Score: 1

      (Note that i used 365.25 days per year to arrive at the 525,960,000 minutes, the real number will be slightly smaller (but nowhere near 102 days))

      --
      CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
    3. Re:Only 85 years short... by freeze128 · · Score: 1

      There is no single piece of hardware that this GIF will run on that will run for 1000 years. Eventually, the capacitors in the power supply and motherboard will dry out, and cause a failure. The best solution is to run it on a VM or container that can be moved from hardware to hardware. This move probably won't happen instantaneously, so there is probably a little wiggle room for hardware maintenance.

      However, 91.5% uptime isn't very good.

    4. Re:Only 85 years short... by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 2

      What, you never replaced components and/or soldered in a powered-up and operating piece of electronics? I'll take your geek card on the way out, thank you very much.

    5. Re:Only 85 years short... by hackertourist · · Score: 1

      Did you account for all the leap years, and all the years that could be leap years but aren't (century years whose number is not divisible by 400)?

    6. Re:Only 85 years short... by fisted · · Score: 1

      No, I approximated it using 1 year = 365.25 days.

      --
      CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
  10. Clocks are art? by LordKronos · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Clocks are art? by LordKronos · · Score: 1

      Well, I think both can be true, right? Clocks = Art, as well as Clocks = Terrorism. And that sort of makes sense: by the transitive property, that implies Art = Terrorism. I can agree with that, because I do find it a bit terrifying that the thing discussed in this article is considered "art".

  11. Very interesting concept by Cochonou · · Score: 2

    The concept if very interesting, however the actual GIF could have been a little more creative than just a counter.

    1. Re:Very interesting concept by ClickOnThis · · Score: 4, Funny

      The concept if very interesting, however the actual GIF could have been a little more creative than just a counter.

      Maybe they could make the last frame a picture of Mickey Mouse. By the time it is displayed, the copyright on his image will have expired. Maybe.

      --
      If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
  12. Can't we do better? by pz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  13. Re: Changes every 10 minutes? by LordKronos · · Score: 2

    Because the GIF spec has frame delay defined as 100ths of a second. I haven't checked the spec, but I presume it's a 16 bit integer. 65535 hundredths of a second equates to 10.9 minutes

  14. You don't understand art. by mark_reh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:You don't understand art. by swell · · Score: 1

      "It's interesting how someone's small waste of time can be snowballed into a collectively huge waste of time by so many others." - Will someone please mark the parent 'insightful'?

      We've seen a great deal of bizarre 'art' since Warhol, etc. A great puzzle for me was Christo who would wrap shorelines with fabric, etc. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) but such eccentricities are becoming almost routine.

      Whether or not it is art is not for me to say; but these things help stimulate a healthy imagination.

      --
      ...omphaloskepsis often...
    2. Re:You don't understand art. by mark_reh · · Score: 1

      You may be right, but his trolling is so much more nuanced than the average, "I'm going to post my opinion as an anonymous coward" produced by Joe Sixpack. Other than calling it art, he makes no pretensions that the .gif is anything more than it is, and he attaches his name to it. As trolling goes it is pretty mild stuff. Yet, in a thousand years someone may assemble and analyze all the responses to the project and he may be considered a genius for the simplicity of the project producing a fractal-like complex response. Imagine the different graphics the response mapping may produce! Maybe something like a pebble tossed into a pond creating ripples growing into tidal waves!

    3. Re:You don't understand art. by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      Short form: You can deflect accusations of being an uncreative, lazy hack by shouting, "META!" at every opportunity.

  15. Boring by vadim_t · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Boring by Oligonicella · · Score: 1

      Consider the person who would come up with the idea in the first place. No, they could not come up with something more interesting than a counter. That's probably their limit for tech science knowledge.

  16. Re:XKCD time comic by pz · · Score: 1

    http://xkcd.com/1190/

    Slightly over 3000 frames, quite a bit shy of the GIF artist's vision (if you'll allow that term), but orders of magnitude more interesting for being a movie to start with, and for being set during the flooding of the Mediterranean Basin, arguably another couple of orders of magnitude more creative.

    Heck, Mandelbrot zooms are more interesting than a counter.

    --

    Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
  17. Does FLIF support that? by sims+2 · · Score: 1

    Does FLIF even support animated graphics?

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
    1. Re:Does FLIF support that? by TeknoHog · · Score: 1

      Yes, its animated version is better known as Multi Image Lossless Format.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  18. Easy answer by rainer_d · · Score: 1
    What remains from out digital culture?
    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
  19. "Stuff that matters" by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

    "Stuff that matters"....indeed.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  20. More "art" by Lumpy · · Score: 1

    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.
    1. Re:More "art" by CurryCamel · · Score: 1

      What happened to people actually making things with their hands?

      Craftsmanship is still going strong, I think.

  21. I dunno by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

    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
  22. I'm sure glad they did by AndyKron · · Score: 1

    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.

  23. Jump scare by Ice+Station+Zebra · · Score: 1

    Pretty sure the last frame is a jump scare.

  24. I can make any animated GIF run that long by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

    Download it from Centurylink.

  25. I would comment but.. by niftymitch · · Score: 1

    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.
  26. Artists? by wisnoskij · · Score: 1

    More like dumb-asses create useless piece of crap.

    --
    Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
    1. Re:Artists? by JohnStock · · Score: 1

      I couldn't agree more.

  27. 'Prior Art' by Hylandr · · Score: 1

    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.
  28. It doubles as by Tablizer · · Score: 1

    ...a Comcast download simulator.

    --
    Table-ized A.I.
  29. re: Fuck GIF by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 1

    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.

    Actually, any dedicated video format would do better than this. I have seen some sites that accept uploading of GIFs only to convert them and serve them as MPEG4. The additional advantage is supporting a larger colour range.

    GIFs seemed cool until I discovered how big they were, compared to the equivalent video. Can anyone explain why they still seem attractive?
    If it is because they are treated as images, maybe the browser image tag could silently accept MPEG4 or WebM and treat them as equivalent somehow?

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  30. Aaand...it's just a text number by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

    In a very low-res font. That don't impress me much.

  31. Given that this is an incrementing number by hattig · · Score: 1

    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