Stephen Wilhite, one of the lead inventors of the GIF, died last week from COVID at the age of 74, according to his wife, Kathaleen, who spoke to The Verge. He was surrounded by family when he passed.

An episode of The Simpsons called “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes” sums up the turn-of-the-century internet quite well. Homer builds a website, dubbed “Mr. X's Web Page” and populates it with animated GIFs of Jesus dancing, screaming mouths, and flying toasters.

In the midst of an animated chat on a WhatsApp group recently, a friend took us by surprise with the casual mention of porn GIFs. "Have you seen it?" she asked.

Remember the good old days™? When Bill Clinton was President, when average monthly rent was around $645, and when Yahoo’s acquisition of GeoCities shot the dream of personal websites into the stratosphere? What a simpler, kinder time.

An adorable black kitten is sitting on a bookshelf, eyes fixed on an insect. It sits, paws perfectly aligned. Then, out of nowhere, it pounces — leaping off the shelf and into the air, wild and frantic.

If an annual award for the ‘hottest digital image format online’ existed, this year’s winner would be the Graphics Interchange Format or gif: an eight-bit, 256-colour bitmap picture file that can composite a series of stills into an infinitely loopable, silent moving image.

The New York fairs are a focus for many in the art world this week, and the brash, yet formally inventive, GIF artworks of Toronto artist Lorna Mills are gaining steam there and beyond.

Why Do Sign Language Interpreters Look So Animated?

corwood:

Kinda groovy.

Dump.fm is a digital version of the old Surrealist genre of the exquisite corpse, a “show and tell” for the polymorphously perverse. The art of dump.fm is genuinely interactive. Social relations are inherent to the entire art making process for these artists, rather than just getting tagged on when a conventional, art world artist begrudgingly begins the promotional stage for their work. The creators of dump.fm have allowed users to post images by pasting URLs into a box or uploading them from users’ computers. There is a convenient interface that allows users to post stills from webcams that dump.fm users often modify. The text is usually chatty and has an insider feel to it. Long time users appear to have developed genuine friendships. However, as long as you can keep up and communicate something using the visual grammar and syntax that lies behind the at times seemingly random flow of images you can join the fun. 

All Aghast