Kaja Cxzy Anderson lives just down the hall from AFC’s office’s offices, so we’ve been checking out her work lately. Her tumblr has a dashboard that resembles Facebook and is filled with screenshots from the site that stretch across the page. Basically, it’s what Facebook would look like if it was designed by interesting people. This particular GIF is a collaboration with Fly Delta Tumblr, a tumblr that’s filled primarily with abstracted GIFs and the occasional monster GIF. The result is a patterned phone GIF with a celebratory corporate blue streamer running across the face of the phone. It’s a slow, methodical perspectival move back and forth in space. Even with the weird crystal that goes in and out of the frame, the GIF still seems to be more urban planning than it is party time. For me, that’s a good thing; party GIFs are ubiquitous. Whatever this is, it’s not a common GIF.
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There might be some questions raised here about the relationship of the phone to the animation. Is the phone part of the GIF or is it an arbitrary static frame for the GIF? Is the “slow, methodical perspectival move back and forth in space” related to “swooping” or “swiping” movements on an Apple smartphone? Would it be possible to view this GIF fullscreen on an actual phone and have it look like this (with or without the viewer’s hand movement interacting with it)? Or is this a purely fictional superimposing of an abstract GIF animation that could appear on a PC or other device into the familiar narrow, vertical rectangle of the phone? PC GIFs are often landscape because that’s the screen orientation; this one is notably vertical — is this indicative of a future shift in our animation-viewing habits or is it an arbitrary graft? That sort of thing.
Good point. I don’t think it’s an arbitrary frame—it’s a familiar frame—and the movement reflects the “load” of an iphone. (I didn’t pick up on this, and in fact, was sure I would find the opposite when I checked the swipe function of the phone. That proved incorrect.)
Looking at it now, I actually find this better viewed on a phone. It’s a little like moving around in a room full of mirrors. The space appears to recede endlessly. That illusion only works on the phone, so I’m glad I tried it.
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