In 2008, Laurel Ptak, founder of the blog iheartphotograph, curated 67 artist-made GIFs for Graphics Interchange Format, an exhibition at Brooklyn’s Bond Street Gallery. The gallery no longer exists and neither does the website that formerly hosted those GIFs. As Paddy noted in her “A Brief History of Animated GIF Art” series on artnet News, the lack of an online archive poses a problem for piecing together the format’s history.
Though we can’t poof the Graphics Interchange Format site back into existence, we can do what we’re good at: googling. All week we’re going to search the web for GIFs that were in the exhibition. For historians, artists, and consumers of net art, this GIFt’s for you.
I emailed Damon Zucconi to ask him about where we could find the GIFs he submitted for Graphics Interchange Format. The three he submitted are up on his site, as one work,“Templates,” and timed so that these nearly identical GIFs rotate in unison. There’s a wonkiness I appreciate with seeing the three GIFs rotate out-of-sync, though. It breaks down the illusion that these three templates look the same, or that they necessarily have to be presented together.
One more note to add about these GIFs: In 2008, the ironic “dirt-style” websites and aesthetics that defined the early aughts were fading in popularity. This change was evident within Graphics Interchange Format, which included a variety of approaches to the format. Compared to C. Coy’s GIF that we posted yesterday, Zucconi’s work reflects the evolving aesthetics; “Templates” looks high-def to C. Coy’s low-fi.
