A Finnish museum plans to display an animated GIF for the next thousand years. Its title, As Long As Possible, acknowledges that may be a stretch.
The GIF at Kiasma’s Museum of Contemporary Art is the work of artist Juha van Ingen and is designed to celebrate both the 100th anniversary of Finnish independence and the 30th anniversary of GIF as a format.
Sadly the GIF in question isn’t a super slo-mo version of Michael Jackson eating popcorn or Don Johnson repeatedly removing his sunglasses. Instead it’s a somewhat duller sequence of black frames with numbers counting up from 1 to 48,140,288 at ten-minute intervals.
The As Long As Possible name is a homage to a 625-year long John Cage composition whose name includes the instruction As Slow As Possible.
The goal is to have up to six synchronised screens playing the GID at any time. If one screen is destroyed, the plan is to build a new one and sync it with the others. In the event of all six being destroyed at the same time – and assuming humanity is still interested in the project after whatever natural or man-made disaster wiped them out – the project can be recreated by opening a sealed time capsule. Currently housed in Estonia, the stainless steel capsule contains details of the art, the original GIF file, a copy of the code behind it, and even the specification of GIF just in case the world has somehow moved on from the era of animated kitties.
[Via: The Next Web]