G.I.F. It Up! // Gifting the Gift of .gif
Collaborative project with Tanner Teale and Katie Miyakie
Gestural Idea Facilitator
We enjoyed the trajectory of our system of .gif very much. Not because of its natural ability to facilitate interaction with a live photo and video set up, but because we were able to have our system evolve into a conceptually sound piece. It started out with an ip cam at my desk and the toggling back and fourth between the two most recent images captured my the camera to make live .gifs and ended up with us exploring ideas of how people can share ideas to create a collective consciousness.
From a technical stand point I enjoyed how our system evolved and the way it utilized photography and video in an in the moment augmentation. We were on the line of an interesting photo/video language. Then it evolved further. It went from us toggling back and fourth between images and being very engaged in the process to having the computer assume active role based off the users collective decisions.
There were both positives and negative to this and that is what made the project so rich. What are the benefits to having a human control a system and what are the benefits of surrendering control to a computer? What are the disadvantages and what gets lost when the computer takes over? By using a processing sketch we were able to achieve what we set out for conceptually, but by loosing the human aspect the users interactions changed and became more controlled.
This is a project I would like to take further by using the affordance of the processing sketch, but also figure out how to reincorporate the human aspect. Overall, I am satisfied with the way this project evolved and progressed because how we developed a specific language for it, a unique piece of software to control the systems environment, and the interesting use of photography and video used simultaneously to create a new mode of .giffing.
Open Source .gif platform
We designed our system to live online as an open source project. Some of our hope which we didn't really follow up on were to see how the internet community would respond to our giffing system once it was back online.
