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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 famous Westinghouse sign in Pittsburgh that went through permutations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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
1,000 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!
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.
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.
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.