{"id":10954,"date":"2014-01-30T00:44:46","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T05:44:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/?p=10954"},"modified":"2021-06-21T11:05:56","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T15:05:56","slug":"forever-changed-the-1840s-tate-gif-party-submission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/2014\/01\/30\/forever-changed-the-1840s-tate-gif-party-submission\/","title":{"rendered":"Forever Changed: The 1840’s Tate GIF Party Submission"},"content":{"rendered":"
\""1858<\/a>

“1858 Past and Present: Forever Changed” animated GIF by aforgrave<\/p><\/div>\n

I’ve been intrigued by the Tate Gallery’s 1840s GIF Party<\/a> and have been looking to find the time to dive in and see what I might come up with. Any invitation to create a GIF is worthy of a response<\/em> — but the opportunity to work with some old school art presents a specially unique challenge.<\/p>\n

My first step was to BP Walk through British Art > 1840″ href=”http:\/\/www.tate.org.uk\/art\/artworks?ap=1&wp=1&wv=grid&rid=8157″ target=”_blank”>browse the gallery of available pieces<\/a> (69 in total) with the task of selecting the images that seemed most GIF-able. Not all of the images suggested some kind of effectible motion to my eye (my GIF-eye-tis<\/a> tends toward the concrete and not the abstract\/psychedelic that some folks arrive at) and in the end I selected 10 paintings for potential animation. With a couple of them potentially set aside and promised to another GIF artist<\/em>, I was down to eight possible choices.<\/p>\n

Moving forward from there was a bit more difficult. I’d already seen some examples completed by ds106 colleagues, as Alan Levine<\/strong> (“Giffing It Like It was 1872”<\/a>), Tom Woodward<\/strong> (“Museum Remixes”<\/a>), and John Johnston<\/strong> (“But Is GIF Art?”<\/a>) lead the way with some artful renderings. Ryan Seslow<\/strong> set is up as a GIFfight challenge<\/a> and it was added to the ds106 Assignment Bank<\/a>. Perhaps I was a bit intimidated with the subject material. After all, this is an art gallery asking us to GIF with Art. I took another look at some of the examples<\/a> provided on the project site, and decided that taking a Terry Gilliam<\/strong> approach might work — as James Kerr aka Scorpion Dagger had done<\/a> as one of the commissioned participants —  the same time, I’ve rarely attempted the Gilliam animation style.<\/p>\n

In then end, I found my attention captured by “Past and Present, No. 1,” painted in 1858 by Augustus Leopold Egg<\/a> — and was pleased with the process which unfolded as I started to work with the image. Without saying too much, I think that in the end the GIF accentuates details present in the painting so as to emphasize a particular narrative. Whether this was the original narrative of the artist, I do not know — I’ve not yet read the text accompanying the image on the Tate website — (later, having read it, yup, it works!). Perhaps this might help a few more folks to see the hidden potential for GIF-as-Art?  The classic ds106<\/strong> assignment<\/em> Say It Like The Peanut Butter<\/a> and the If We Don’t Remember Me<\/a> collection are two superior places for you to go if you need some convincing of the power of the GIF as art form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2022 LINK to the full-size (1088 pixels wide) version of the GIF (817 KB)<\/a><\/strong>.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Tate Gallery 1840’s GIF Party<\/strong> is accepting submissions<\/a> for a couple more days — they close their inboxes on February 2nd before the adjudication process leading up to the February 7th opening in London.  Hopefully I’ll have time to attempt a couple more submissions before then. Maybe I’ll try an abstract or a Gilliam next time?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been intrigued by the Tate Gallery’s 1840s GIF Party and have been looking to find the time to...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[235,170,167,15,46],"tags":[691,687,132,218,228,684,688,1078,690,685,321,692,686,689],"class_list":["post-10954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-animated-gif-ds106assignments","category-ds106assignments","category-ds106bestwork","category-ds106","category-imaginages","tag-1840s-gif-party","tag-1858-past-and-present-no-1","tag-alan-levine","tag-animatedgif","tag-animatedgifassignments","tag-animatedgifassignments1248","tag-augustus-leopold-egg","tag-ds106","tag-gif-eye-tis","tag-giffight","tag-john-johnston","tag-ryan-seslow","tag-tate-gallery","tag-tom-woodward"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2UvWF-2QG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/1858_Past-and-Present_Forever-Changed_600.gif","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10954"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12418,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10954\/revisions\/12418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aforgrave.ca\/detritus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}