GIFs are one of the old­est image for­mats used on the web. The GIF graph­ics file for­mat was invented by Com­puServe in 1987. Throughout their his­tory, they have served a huge vari­ety of pur­poses, from func­tional to enter­tain­ment. Now, 25 years after the first GIF was cre­ated, they are expe­ri­enc­ing an explo­sion of inter­est and inno­va­tion that is push­ing them into the ter­rain of art.

Please watch the fol­low­ing episode of Off Book, fea­tur­ing inter­views of Christo­pher Price Edi­to­r­ial Direc­tor at Tum­blr, Patrick David­son from Meme­Fac­tory, a group that gives pre­sen­ta­tions about inter­net memes, Pamela Reed and Mathew Rader from REED + RADER, mostly ded­i­cated to fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy and Visual Graph­ics Artist Kevin Burg with pho­tog­ra­pher Jamie Beck cre­ators of Cin­ema­graph.

We love ani­mated GIFs here at ‘The Remains’ and we con­stantly see amaz­ing exam­ples of cre­ative and inspir­ing GIFs in sites like Tum­blr where they are spe­cially pop­u­lar, but we par­tic­u­larly like the work of artist Max Capac­ity. I will ven­ture here to say that his ani­mated GIFs are post­mod­ern, com­bin­ing in them glitch art, pixel art, movies and stuff I can­not even start to describe. The fact that he uses the name Max Capac­ity is prob­a­bly not a coin­ci­dence as he has a lot of work to show up for. I can spend hours jump­ing from his Flickr site to his Tum­blr site to his YouTube chan­nel check­ing out his uni­verse of pro­lific cre­ation. Watch some sam­ples of his work below:

Ok, lastly we want to leave you with one last video from PBS Off Book. A 25th Anniver­sary GIF short Mashup set to 8-bit Dubstep.