The Digital Materiality of GIFs

January 22, 2016 3:13 PM

A short exploration of the history, present and future of the Internet's most animated image format, The Digital Materiality of GIFs.
posted by dragoon (20 comments total)

That was like a freakin nightmare come to life. Needs some sort of warning.
posted by bongo_x at 3:24 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Warning: the article about GIFs has a bunch of GIFs.
posted by aubilenon at 3:36 PM on January 22, 2016 [10 favorites]

while individually these
decisions to decrease
file sizes or stop gifs
from autoplaying make
sense, this desire to
optimize as well as
commercialize gifs
ends up siloing these
animations from each
other, removing the
portability and ease of
remixing that makes
gifs exciting at all.

but you have to take animation frames which are often, as this GIFSSAY demonstrates, sourced from commercial videos and hosted on commercial sites. perhaps there is an artistic tension of sorts in understanding that what is ultimately remixed is remix culture itself and that the price of free hosting and distribution is being subject to that commercialization and siloization. that is to say, this is part of the internet that destroys the internet.
posted by boo_radley at 4:12 PM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

Okay, the Nicholas Fong stuff is chilling me right the fuck out.

Thanks for posting!
posted by selfnoise at 4:14 PM on January 22, 2016

What does the word "materiality" actually mean here? It's certainly not "materiality." Perhaps "inherent properties as a format"?
posted by RogerB at 4:29 PM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Presumably this, but I had to look it up:
• chiefly Law the quality of being relevant or significant: the applicant must establish materiality on the balance of probabilities.
posted by rodlymight at 4:45 PM on January 22, 2016

Materiality is exactly the opposite of "format."

Clay is a material. You can buy it from many places. You can buy the tools to work with clay from many people. The techniques for working in clay are known and transferrable. No one owns clay.

None of those things are true with any of the proprietary formats that the various social networks are promoting to replace GIFs.
posted by danny the boy at 5:22 PM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

This gives me a vocabulary to explain why Twitter's GIF conversion is so loathsome that I didn't have before. (I mean, beyond the fact that Twitter GIFs require Flash and seem to just flat out not work half the time.)
posted by tobascodagama at 5:43 PM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Funnily enough GIF was the subject of one of the bigger software patent fiascos. At this point all the patents have expired, but in the 90s you had to pay licensing fees to use it (the problem was the compression technique used).

Also HTML5 video is non-proprietary, or at least can be. It's objectively superior to GIF in every way, at least in theory.

In practice GIFs are better than anything else imo. I don't know why. Just something about the palette and other constraints leads people to make good choices instead of bad choices. (Also the lack of sound helps.)
posted by vogon_poet at 5:44 PM on January 22, 2016 [6 favorites]

I think the essay actually makes a really good argument for the strength of GIF not lying in its proprietary/non-proprietary status but rather in the ease of remixing a particular GIF by simply downloading it and putting it into any image editing software. I do think that GIFs have a unique status in that regard. Cutting up and editing short animations in actual video formats requires more specialised knowledge. (All the non-linear editing software I know of is... not exactly user friendly.)
posted by tobascodagama at 5:49 PM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

BTW the tool used by Tumblr on the backend to resize and compress GIFs is called gifsicle and can be easily installed on your own computer to play with.
posted by vogon_poet at 5:50 PM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

Warning: the article about GIFs has a bunch of GIFs.

Right? It's like having to warn people that Moby-Dick has a bunch of stuff in it about whales.
posted by Cookiebastard at 6:45 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also GIFs are way less complicated than any HTML5 video format. When browsers are asked if they can play HTML5 video they answer "probably", "maybe", or "no".

Although it might be nice if we ever decided on an animated PNG format, but meh.

(Also I was distracted by all the flickering images and didn't read much of the text, sorry)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:49 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

It really was serendipitous the way the particular limits of gif compression ground up against the internet's file size tolerances for a few years. The few meg that people were willing to download or host gave you just enough space to be clever, without giving you the slack to quit caring.

because of their constraints they become a design material

You could almost shorten that to just "constraints become material", and it's a great point that's probably been pointed out for as long as people have been arting - blank canvases are hard to fill. On a practical level I'm happy that efficient new video formats are starting to take over, but I hope they have enough chinks in the armour for people to continue doing off label stuff. Useless rulemaking like minimum resolution limits can absolutely take a hike too.
posted by lucidium at 6:57 PM on January 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

Why on earth would Tumblr need a minimum resolution?
posted by LogicalDash at 7:04 PM on January 22, 2016

I'm guessing it has to do with overheads in their document store. Like, the size of the metadata required for a 16x16 GIF exceeds the size of the GIF itself. Which is not inherently a problem, but it's inefficient from the document store's perspective and could possibly screw up their caching algorithms or something as well.

But that's just a total guess, and for all I know it was an aesthetic choice not to let people embed a ton of custom animated emojis or whatever. Not that Tumblr seems all that interested in avoiding that particular aesthetic per se.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:31 PM on January 22, 2016

Right? It's like having to warn people that Moby-Dick has a bunch of stuff in it about whales.

More like that edition of Moby Dick that comes with a bunch of actual whales slapping you over the head.
posted by effbot at 9:42 AM on January 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

Cutting up and editing short animations in actual video formats requires more specialised knowledge. (All the non-linear editing software I know of is... not exactly user friendly.)

I know I'm being stingy and should pay for my software, but I'm still really surprised at the lack of decent freeware editing tools for the amateur who just wants to do something really basic like splice together a few scenes from a couple videos and add some text.
posted by straight at 1:22 PM on January 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

What part of "DIGITAL Materiality" is confounding people trying to understand the sense in which "materiality" is being used?

It's not like SHA is using "materiality" as a synonym for "tangible".
posted by mistersquid at 11:17 AM on January 24, 2016

Also this GIFSSAY was too short.
posted by mistersquid at 11:17 AM on January 24, 2016