Rob Manuel

Just had an email from Connor Clark who writes, “I’ve rather foolishly decided to write my dissertation on ‘animated GIFs in web culture’ looking at its history on the early web to its recent renaissance. as part of this i would like to interview some relevant artists/curators.”

Connor has give me some questions, but I thought it might be interesting to throw this out to the internet for comments? Please add your thoughts.

When you started the B3ta message-board in 2001, did you consider it as a community for just sharing images, rather than animations?
Neither. We saw it as a community for encouraging people to create web projects.

However, animated gifs were part of the message board tho pretty much from the start. I was mildy obsessed with them and used to make tributes to my favourites.

Like a bunny in an ascii mirror:
http://www2.b3ta.com/_bunny/

And my tribute to the crappiest / best animated gifs at the time. It already was a world tinged with nostalgia and I was saying goodbye in 2001
http://www2.b3ta.com/videokilledtheradiostar/

Many viral animated GIFs have originated on the B3ta message-board, is there one which is particularly memorable for you?
I liked the Halifax one which had Howard shagging a girl from behind. Two frames – utterly changed the meaning of the slogan, “who gives you extra?” Halifax’s lawyers got in touch and made us remove it but they’ll never remove it from my mind.

Do you see animated GIFs as purely nostalgia for old technology, part of a wider trend of retro-fetishism?
Maybe. Mostly I think it’s user interface thing. They play inline without anyone having to press a button. Handy in messageboards etc.

GIF animation was arguably made obsolete by technology such as Flash and streaming video, why do you think it continues to thrive on content sharing websites such as Tumblr/Reddit?
See above. They also loop which Youtube doesn’t. Some jokes are better for being repeated endlessly without having to press play.

The recent closure of Geocities highlighted how easily web content can disappear forever, do you feel that the visual history of the Web (user generated content rather than web design) should be taken more seriously?
Of course. It’s a crime that so much primary source history gets flushed down the memory hole in the name of saving a few quid on web space. Let’s burn libraries. No? Exactly. @Textfiles is good on this subject – talk to him.

‘Web 2.0′ saw a drive to professionalise the Web; Facebook for example does not allow animated GIFs. Does the often purile/lo-fi aesthetic of many messageboard posts represent an anti-professional ideology?
Web 2.0 wasn’t a drive to professionalise the web. It was just marketing speak to glue together a bunch of sites that centered around user created content rather than paying a load of journalists.

BTW: Twitter does allow ani gifs if you are careful. 128px square and less than 1mb.

Anyway – please feel free to answer Conner’s questions yourself. Please do.