jovius writes:
Finnish artists Juha van Ingen and Janne Särkelä have developed a monumental GIF called AS Long As Possible, which loops once per 1000 years. The 12 gigabyte GIF is made of 48,140,288 numbered frames, that change about every 10 minutes. They plan to start the loop in 2017, when GIF turns 30 years old. "If nurturing a GIF loop even for 100 — let alone 3,000 years — seems an unbelievable task, how much remains of our present digital culture after that time?", van Ingen said. The artists plan to store a mother file somewhere and create many iterations of the loop in various locations — and if one fails, it may be easily synchronized with, and replaced by, another. Maybe they should use
FLIF instead.
Very interesting concept
By Cochonou
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2015-Oct-3 10:58
• Score: 3
• Thread
The concept if very interesting, however the actual GIF could have been a little more creative than just a counter.
Can't we do better?
By pz
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2015-Oct-3 10:59
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
The Long Now is a far better project than a GIF with slowly increasing numbers. Heck, Arthur Ganson's "Machine with Concrete" is better, and covers the same idea.
If they had made the GIF a 1000 year movie of non-trivial content, then it might be far more interesting. But then, "The Clock" movie which covers 24 hours is brilliant and would be hard to surpass for density of ideas.
48M frames would be about 550 hours of footage at 24 frames per second. That's multiple lifetimes worth of output for a prolific movie maker. So it's unlikely that you could really produce that many frames -- even ones that aren't that different one from the next, as you would have in a normal movie.
How about something more tractable and interesting? How about "Swan Lake" at 1/100th speed (inspired by David Michalek's "Slow Dancing")? How about a basketball game at 1/100th speed? How about time-lapse of something even slower, like a simulation of geological weathering? And those are just off the top of my head. A sequence of numbers? To celebrate GIF? Can't we do better?
Re:Yawn... This was more interesting 50 years ago
By AthanasiusKircher
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2015-Oct-3 11:20
• Score: 4, Informative
• Thread
A better comparison is made in TFA to the musical piece by John Cage called As Slow As Possible. While initial performances were for a half hour or hour, some crazy people decided to build an organ in Germany and plan a performance that will last over 600 years. (The next note will change in 2020.) And then you have stuff like stretching out a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to 24 hours without pitch distortions, which was vaguely interesting over a decade ago.
At least these previous projects had a goal of taking a preexisting artwork and pushing it to its limits. When such things were first done, it at least brought up philosophical musings about the perception of time and artworks. I'm not sure what this adds or what the novel achievement is here other than "watch me program an image file that changes slowly."
You don't understand art.
By mark_reh
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2015-Oct-3 11:27
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
The long, slow, uncreative .gif file is only a tiny part of this project. The biggest piece of the project is the commentary about whether it is art, created by all of us after being manipulated by the artist into doing so. The artist's contribution to the whole work was his ability to get media attention for his project and to generate something so uncreative, even unartistic in the traditional sense, so lacking in required practice or skill, that it would surely get the ball rolling on the comments.
In this, my one comment, I have done more work than the "artist" did for the whole project.
It's interesting how someone's small waste of time can be snowballed into a collectively huge waste of time by so many others.
THAT is ART, and I am pleased to have been allowed a chance to contribute to the project.
Re:Let me be the first to point out
By Joce640k
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2015-Oct-3 13:48
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
...and once every ten minutes? Jeez.
I've got some funny cat GIFs that would play for a million years if I only change the image once per millennium. Can I have my prize for being clever?