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given that GIF has a reduced colorspace you did, by default, lose some of the image.

Who are you quoting? Nobody in this thread (or, so far as I can tell, the internet as a whole) has called Tumult Hype open-source. In fact, the last time I heard anyone but you mention the App Store, it was because Apple was pulling GPL software from the Store because of license term clashes: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/no-gpl-apps-for-apples-app-store/8046. 

Given that that’s a pretty strong point for your argument, I have to assume you haven’t been following this, but decided to make up a quote anyway.

Tom, I don’t think Tim is claiming that we should only listen to professional coders/designers – just that it might be a good idea to pay more attention to people who actually know what they’re talking about when discussing technical details. As yr last post ably demonstrated you don’t seem to be part of that group.

har. I agree. Other senses (besides vision) convey cultural information, and other species (besides humans) experience cultural conditions.

My issue w/ Tom’s arguments isn’t that they’re incomplete but simply that large parts of his latest GIF/CSS article are, opinion aside, _factually_ incorrect. While Tim could have been more diplomatic about it he does have a point.

Attempting to make something useful from this:

As far as I understand, Tom criticized the Googles for doing lots of complicated stuff in order to show this dance animation instead of putting the same effort into creating a simple GIF. He didn’t criticize them for wasting bandwidth or other “technical” reasons, this came later in exploring their motives and thinking about other new (and more complex) ways moving images can be transferred online today and trying to make sense of them.

Tim’s reply, that GIFs are regarded as simple and the mere mortals can create GIFs only because there is software that allows them to do so, is of course true — however the software is there in bucketloads, it doesn’t only theoretically exist in the future GIFs are files that are definitely easier to understand and handle than Google’s scripting. If the animation would be a GIF, one could for example take the animation and post it to some forum or whatever, change the colors, play it backwards, etc. There is effectively not so much difference between the source material and the finished version to create a serious obstacle to work with it. So, a GIF would have been, also to my understanding, adequate to the spirit of the web. On the other hand, there is no tool for re-creating the source material from Google’s animation “compiled” to Javascript. Of course it can be done, there is no standard way of doing so though. And it wouldn’t make sense to create a tool that would do it because it is unlikely that Google or anybody else will use this exact technique, producing similar output, again.

The quite confrontational remarks that Tom doesn’t know enough about the web and its technology are probably exactly the core of he issue. Tom’s general question *is* why the hell one should have to know so much arbitrary stuff about the web to understand how a conceptually primitive animation is made. Does it mean only developers, who know every in and out of the latest tech, Google’s organization and internally used tools, are allowed to interpret this piece of online art? These questions have nothing to do with Tom’s age, his music or how often he checks his Twitter. The user facing web used to be simple yet powerful, it is made more complex and diffiult to understand, especially in an area where it seems completely arbitrary; what is the driving force behind this, how does it affect artistic expression and evaluation?

In general I think Tom’s critique of the animation is exactly this: a critique, and interpretation of an artwork. And the seemingly superfluous complexity of it is part of the interpretation. Based on Google’s artistic output to the world, he made an attempt to understand what are Google’s motives, how they see their role and the role of their users.

And while Tom is pinned down on technical inaccuracy, nobody else seems bold enough to make definite technical counter claims. Maybe because there is so much potential for getting stuff wrong?

Technically, there is in many cases a right way to do something to achieve a verifiable goal. There are certain tricks to make web pages load faster, animations look smoother, etc. So let’s assume that Google managed to save some bytes by delivering the animation in the means they decided to and therefore saved some money.

Culturally, however, there is not one right way to do stuff. Different choices, also in trechnology, express different things.

Interestingly, while animator, coreographer and dancer are credited for the dance animation, the “developer” is not, see http://www.google.com/logos/ (as long as it is listed under this URI). That probably means that somebody assumed that technology can be transparently applied here and “just” has to deliver the animation in the most effective way or something. As it turns out, this is not the case. So, if Google are not consciously widening the gap between professionals and users, they are at least naive.

I love you all by the way!

Hey Alex,

Sorry I wasn’t able to respond to this earlier. I only had net access this weekend via my phone and it was inconsistent at best. 

There’s a lot more conversation that’s happened since this note, but to answer the part of the question that directly relates to me: Tim got the scolding because he was telling me what I should and shouldn’t write about. That probably doesn’t cross a line of inappropriateness but it definitely makes me uncomfortable. I think it’s probably all in the phrasing. 

As far as not being more aggressive with Tom and his conversation with Will, keep in mind that he is the Associate Editor of this blog and has a long comment history with Tom. So, yes, I could scold Tom for needlessly interpreting Will’s words as aggressive, but in doing so I step on Will’s toes and make Tom feel like he’s being ganged up on. I decided there were more negatives than positives in that scenario, and moderated accordingly. 

As for your own comments, while you’ve done well to expand your critique of Tom’s post over the weekend, I ask that you try to remember that you are talking to actual people, who have feelings. You’ve made some thoughtful comments, but in the process called others “idiot-kings”, “ignorant”, and “intellectually dishonest”. Even if all of these things were correct, naming them all would still be a bad starting point for a conversation. They only benefit the commenter. 

Anyway, I’d be curious to hear how the values of the “the old guard” and “the new guard”, differ, as this is another evaluation proffered without support. 

As for Google’s motivations, I’ve placed a press inquiry with the company, so we can get their official position on the Martha Graham GIF, and GIFs in general. Hopefully that will help answer a few questions. 

Thanks for this. I didn’t mean for it to be an aggressive question – I meant for it to be an easy question, actually, and kind of reset things to a baseline as they got heated – so it’s nice to get a thoughtful reply. 

I think the formal discussion – as you say, the choice to use GIFs as the choice between acrylic and watercolor – was pretty well handled by Tom and me, with plenty of examples, in both this and the last thread. I get (and got) that. All of which is not to say that I like your reply any less, or that it is any less an excellent statement of the motives behind this medium. 

The crux of my question was meant to be the second part – the turn Tom took from form to politics, and whether that changed things. That is to say, whether GIFs were important to preserve outside the bounds of art-making (“as a social project”), since the urgency of Tom’s argument (here as elsewhere) didn’t seem to make sense in the context of form. 

As for obsolescence: 
My introduction to BASIC was in 1996. I was 7, and BASIC was 32. My mom, then teaching computer science to Army technicians, taught me how to make the computer say hello, and how to make it do math, and she taught me in a language that was by any measure obsolete. It compiled. It executed. I might never have known it was ancient. 

BASIC is now 47, and all that’s still true. It can still create executables that run in modern environments. And why not? It’s just a way of structuring instructions, just a particular organization of data. GIFs aren’t going away. Too much has been done in the format, too much work has gone into building support for it in image processing software and browsers, and as you say, there’s no widely-supported atomic alternative. You’re absolutely right that it’s a shitload of trouble to go to, replacing GIFs, and there’s no clear reward for it, for anyone. 

Designers finding GIFs unsuitable for their purposes does not mean GIFs will be erased from the internet entirely. Web developers – on, for instance, Facebook – are a greater threat, but at best can only damage the popularity of the medium. Browser developers have no reason to remove GIF support, and many reasons not to. 

So then. Maybe another series of questions:

If your artwork – your GIFs – continue to exist and function and be visible on all browsers, but are no longer used by the web public generally, is that bad? Now, there are plenty of GIFs that reference GIF culture in general or other GIFs in particular, and so would benefit from their continued popularity, but I don’t know that those relationships *could* be preserved in a vital, immediate sense any more than the symbolism in, say, Italian Renaissance painting. This is, as I see it, the worst case scenario under present discussion.

If GIFs stopped being supported by browsers, but your GIFs could be translated painlessly, with identical pixels, to the new cross-browser atomic lossless raster animation format (a category of file for which there will always be a need), would that be a problem? Is there something about the compression algorithms or name or history of the format that needs to remain? I guessed ‘no’ in the last thread, and never really got a response to that. We are, however, at least 10 years from this situation.

I’m terrifically excited to see which part of this comment shows up on Tom’s blog.

that makes sense – “better control of the user experience” is somewhat vague but I think yr reading of it is the correct one.

another potential reason they chose it – which I don’t think has been discussed here yet – is the fact that GIFs are limited to 256 colors. that’s fine for art, especially since it uses the small colorspace as an asset rather than a limitation, but given that all Google’s logos, graphics etc are presumably in a larger colorspace, it seems plausible that using a 256-color GIF just wouldn’t look completely _right_ in this context.

there isn’t really any other technical advantage to be gained from using CSS sprite animation rather than GIFs in this case. what sprites are genuinely useful for is animations/buttons w/ many repeated frames, as they can save a lot of bandwidth. so while CSS sprites are a good tool they are, generally speaking, more useful in a UI context rather than an artistic one.