I recommend checking out The Animation Alphabet, made by 4th and 5th graders (source of the GIFs above.) There's something simple about the setup that's really quite perfect, and something about the slowness of the looping animations... amazing. Also check out the rest of the GIFs, featuring more Paint animations and some stop motion stuff, made by Mr. Wampole's students. (Especially the stop motion Mini Movies at the very bottom.) (Found via Squeaky From, which has cool links but seems to be down right now.)

Mrs. Alyce Jenks' Second Grade Web Pages also have some exciting simple GIF animations made by kids. I think the new versions of KidPix let you do animations? Not sure. More kid art here and here, and also see Travis Hallenbeck's amazing Paint and bitmap link collections.

I'm in my first real show! With a whole bunch of awesome awesome people! This is really exciting... Marisa Olson (who's curating the show) put up a post with all the info, but I'll summarize: It opens Wednesday, May 3rd at RX Gallery in San Francisco. The other artists in the show are Cory Arcangel, Peter Baldes, Michael Bell-Smith, Jimpunk, Olia Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Lovid, Tom Moody, Paper Rad, Paul Slocum, and Matt Smear (aka 893/umeancompetitor). And it's all about GIFs! And Marisa made a zany Myspace profile for the show, YES!

Marisa says:

Everyone's showing GIFs, and some are also showing videos, works on paper, sound, and other cool related stuff. Together, their work shows the diversity of forms to be found in GIFs, and many of them comment on the broader social life of these image files.

Hence the Myspace page... GIFs grow, breed, and comingle sparklingly on Myspace.

Whoa, well put. Also, Tom Moody explains (in reference to this show and his upcoming solo show of GIFs):

Why GIFs? They're a relatively "open source" way to get ideas, in the form of moving images, out to broad audience. They are low or no cost to make, consume very little bandwidth, no one has to buy or download a proprietary player to play them. They have their own special charm, minimal in the way garage rock is minimal.

My video is called "Marathon" and will look like the image up there at the top of this entry, except those little dudes will be animated and running a non-stop icon marathon (in a never-ending hypnotic seamless loop.) It involves icons made using this popular website. If you're not farmiliar with these little guys, the idea is that you pick out a nose, eyes, hairstyle, etc., to make a little GIF face that resembles/represents you, and you can throw it up on your blog or Myspace or wherever. Here's one of me from a year or so ago:



These icons spread around like crazy on the net a bit ago. (More recently it was getting really popular to make full body doll icons of youself on this site. But, uh, warning: the site is really CPU-intensive and actually was what triggered my laptop hard drive to crash a month ago..whoa!!) Anyways, so excited to be in a show with all those awesome folks, and I hope I can make it to the opening (but since it's in the middle of the week and I have a midterm the next morning, argh, we'll see..)

Dogwanger jam by Mystical Ointment


Aquarium groove


Kids loop


I've started making music videos for my own music, which sounds like a sort of silly thing to devote energy to (is it?..are music videos still commercials even if it's your own tunes?..and they're too damn easy to make.) I've tried to make super simple videos using Mac's built-in iMovie program. Like really simple, very slow and boring. I have a budding interest in boring things, mundane things, slow things.

The slow zoom-ins of Skyscrapers shot from ground level in the Dogwanger video I find hillarious -- they're an automated default slideshow effect -- and the buildings just look so dumb to me, though they're trying so hard to impress me and intimidate me. The music is like Blade Runner meets Muzak but played really crapilly (all these songs are recorded using computer keyboard instead of music keyboard as live input..it's fun, haha.) I think the kids go well with the skyscrapers, but I can't figure out if they make the video subtly optimistic or completely depressing. The other two songs are new and don't have Myspace band profiles yet. I made the music and video simultaneously (moving back and forth between audio and visual) for both of these.

Paralleling my budding obsession with boringness is a blossoming (?!) obsession with loops, which is becoming really apparent in the music. Long stretches of music, unchanging, no climax, no intro or conclusion. Maybe I absorbed this from YTMND? heh.

I finished two new Trinkets chapters, V and VI, check them out if you get a chance... V is the original Trinkets page from before my website ever went up, when I was super excited about LARPing, etc. VI has got a maddening slowed down Whitney Houston MIDI ("Waiting to Exhale" -> "Waiting to exhale... FOREVER!!"). I just turned the tempo way down on it, and copy/pasted different measures at random until it became about 20 minutes long: so it's pretty much slowest MIDI jam ever.. I think I enjoy listening to it but I might actually be hypnotized. VI is basically scenes from my upcoming instructional video about gradients, loops and filetypes (sort of!)

Also for RSS people I finally made an RSS feed for Trinkets, here. This might be a bad idea, I'm not sure... a lot of Trinkets posts might not jive with RSS readers, and I'll be crossposting here and there sporadically.

[note: definitely won't look right in rss readers!!]

I freaking love these robot stopper guys, they're like the special task you must complete before you get free stuff! I started collecting them a while back, and I'm still trying to think of neat stuff to do with them... This is a gradient of ones from Myspace.

BTW, I currently have 18 myspace profiles (and matching Hotmail adresses)!!! It is becoming quite a pain to check all of them...

*related: collages

Definitely my most prized posession: I found this printing "mistake" abandoned in the computer labs last year... Someone had printed out on the wrong side of photo paper and the ink went absolutely nuts. It's some really epic Anime-ish fan art, a character holding a red sword and looking all pissed, now exploding all melty and gooey coz it didn't dry correctly. The black drip in the center was wet and kept dripping down super-slowly for like 5 days after I got it (I hung it on the wall after I took it home.) This thing is 11 x 17 inches and looks amazing in person!!

Check out a high-res scan, or an even higher-res detail!

Rainbowed dinos of black n' white bitmaps from The Dinosaur Encycolpedia.. maybe more variations to come! (...as Mike would say, "that's not scientific.")