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14 posts tagged GIFs

How The Rebirth Of The GIF Screws Up Authorship This MIT-built app creates crowdsourced, time-lapse animations from individual snapshots which aren’t quite still images but aren’t video either. The renaissance of the GIF is also blowing up distinctions between time, place, and creator—all because you want to animate your cat. Apps like Vine and Cinemagram have blown up what used to be a simple distinction between still images and video. Now an MIT app project has made the line even blurrier by using content created by different authors, officially enabling users to kick off a video-ish experience created by no one in particular, at no particular point in time. The result of these authorless GIF-like animations is fast-moving “flipbook” animations that show a single location through the eyes of many. Subsequent photos at the location add frames automatically, creating a collaborative record of the spot over time. While playful photography is fun, the project’s larger impact is to demonstrate an interface for collaboratively documenting spaces over time—without much deliberate action on the behalf of anyone. We caught up with MIT Mobile Experience Lab Systems Designer Steve Pomeroy to talk about the project, which is dubbed FLIPR. Here’s the story.

How The Rebirth Of The GIF Screws Up Authorship

This MIT-built app creates crowdsourced, time-lapse animations from individual snapshots which aren’t quite still images but aren’t video either. The renaissance of the GIF is also blowing up distinctions between time, place, and creator—all because you want to animate your cat.

Apps like Vine and Cinemagram have blown up what used to be a simple distinction between still images and video. Now an MIT app project has made the line even blurrier by using content created by different authors, officially enabling users to kick off a video-ish experience created by no one in particular, at no particular point in time.

The result of these authorless GIF-like animations is fast-moving “flipbook” animations that show a single location through the eyes of many. Subsequent photos at the location add frames automatically, creating a collaborative record of the spot over time. While playful photography is fun, the project’s larger impact is to demonstrate an interface for collaboratively documenting spaces over time—without much deliberate action on the behalf of anyone.

We caught up with MIT Mobile Experience Lab Systems Designer Steve Pomeroy to talk about the project, which is dubbed FLIPR.

Here’s the story.

There’s been plenty of oohing and ahhing over the opening of New York’s Museum of Math, and for good reason. It’s remarkable how fun math can be in the hands of the right curator. To wit: The inaugural installation by artist and perceptual scientist Matthew Brand. Brand is the inventor of something called the specular hologram, a type of optical illusion that tricks your eye into thinking a 2-D object is 3-D.

There’s been plenty of oohing and ahhing over the opening of New York’s Museum of Math, and for good reason. It’s remarkable how fun math can be in the hands of the right curator. To wit: The inaugural installation by artist and perceptual scientist Matthew Brand. Brand is the inventor of something called the specular hologram, a type of optical illusion that tricks your eye into thinking a 2-D object is 3-D.