We love GIFS. They make us laugh. They make us cringe. We’ve made some pretty stellar ones after long meetings and late nights – today’s inside joke. But while we like making our own GIFS we really appreciate the art of GIFS from all of the other GIF-makers out there.
So we started to look for these artists. A zillion of tweets ago, we came across GIFRIENDS, a group of talented GIF-makers and friends. I (not-so-secretly) wanted to be friends with them. Their name alone said we were destined to be friends.
As you know, I’m a big fan of Collaborative Art so I thought it would be fun to try a collaborative GIF. The idea: each group would provide images to work with and each group would “GIF-a-fy”, and send them back.
For a little extra fun, I decided to ask both of our GIF-makers some questions.
1.How did you start GIFRIENDS?
GIFRIENDS: We all knew each other before but didn’t start making gifs together until about 2010. Michael Fivis was the first one of us to start making them and then gradually all of us started to make them too. The group pretty much formed from there. Alex loves groups, and making his friends make stuff together with him. JL: I did not start GIFRIENDS… but I just started making gifs as inter office jokes and then it grew from there, I remember learning making GIFs back in 1999 using ImageReady but did not use that skill until a few years ago, and then it became a thing here.
2. Why do you love GIFS?
GIFRIENDS: GIFs are great because the way you experience them is so similar to the way you experience a still photo, but you get this extra dimension of motion and the loop. Despite their limitations, there’s a lot to play with. Alex, Michael and Marisa also have a super strong affinity for the Internet and this weird sense of impermanence that net art works seem to have. Both Peter and Alex went to film school before we all met at Parsons - they still love movies a lot too, so part of that kind of transferred to why we love GIFs since it can work as an in-between of both still and time based mediums. JL: They are the an emoticon on crack. Please read. 7 signs you are actually a GIF
4. How did you like working with each other’s images?
GIFRIENDS: Working with Agenda’s images are definitely fun and something different. As much as we love illustrations, all four of us came from photo backgrounds and we are all bad at drawing. It’s a fun little experiment that we would love to play around with more, for sure. JL: Similarly, I am more of an Illustrator, not good at drawing either; but always found line art to come naturally. Working with GF imagery felt great. I really like the colllage/photo/glitch aesthetic so that’s something we should pursue further. What?
We look forward to doing more of these fun experiments/collaborations in the future!