Gifs in Art

I was inspired to write this post about gifs after I clicked on the 8 bit gif link in the syllabus. The link I clicked on contained some gifs of famous scfi and fantasy movies. The unique part about it was that they were all in 8 bit just like an old video game.
This got me thinking about how far technology has progressed in such a short period. It wasn't too long ago that we were playing pong and space invaders. These days there are hundreds of games on the market  that are far more advanced. The resolution is exponentially, and it is common practice for games to run at 60 plus frames a second.

But what does this have to do with gifs paul, and what does this have to do with that annoying gif of the transforming building? Gifs are a great new tool for art and technology, they allow users to create a short "moving image" of something rather than making a video. The gif of the transforming building is a prime example of the benefits that gifs give artists. Before an architect would have to display his or her idea with several consecutive images or a video made in a high end modeling program. Now all they need to do is make their design in photoshop or illustrator, draw the parts they want to animate and then use a gif generator to pull it all together. On top of being easy to make gifs are also very lightweight in terms of file size compared to comparable videos. No need to hit pause or play the gif just does its own thing once its embedded in a site. Gifs are a great piece of technology for artists and open a whole new creative worlds to be explored.




Building Gif Source