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.
It’s Thursday, which means we’re running out of days to post GIFs this week. We have so many to share with you, too. Artist Daniel Everett contacted us saying he had recently uncovered a number of them within his own files. Our laptops: where GIFs go to get lost, and sometimes found again. (Above: Daniel Everett, “Virtual Self-esteem,” 2008. Below: Karly Wildenhaus, “IHP,” 2008; Noel Rodo-Vankeulen, “Black Monolith,” 2008.)
