I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I finished helping my computer recover from a long semester of incredibly disorganized use, and spent some time playing around with photos.  Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about animated gifs… seems like people are sick enough of them that we oughta bring them back.  I heard someone making a joke about them recently, and everyone laughed on cue like it was a joke about the president (don’t get me wrong, I’ve been known to drop an animated gif bit or two myself).

The punchline of this and similar jokes concerned, of course, how obviously unsophisticated the people who use them must be.  Animated gifs are certainly the unofficial seal of crappy clipart web design, but, can they be anything more? Tom Moody’s done some interesting things with them, as have others, I’m sure.  Here’s my attempt…

This one is composed of three images, one from Iceland, one from Austin, and one of a Flavin piece at MOMA in NYC, which I haven’t altered other than to play with the transparency.  See if you get hypnotized or irritated (you can also view the huge [11mb!], slow-loading version, but give it a second to get its rhythm). It’ll be interesting to see what flickr thinks of it, or maybe my cellphone.

I really like the pebbly effect, and think that the jerky animation has lots of potential.   I think I’ll try a few more, perhaps attempting less smoothed-out transitions. Fun!