UPLOAD.GIF

October 12th, 2013 - San Francisco, CA

UPLOAD.gif is a partnership between NewHive.com and GrayArea.org, inviting new and experienced artists to upload artworks to be exhibited online and as part of special public events in San Francisco.

Our first event will take place at NewHive, and will be a celebration of the Animated GIF! Spanning 26 years, GIFs are now one of the oldest image formats on the web. An in-between medium that is lighter than a video and heavier than a photo, animated GIFs occupy a unique position in popular culture, accounting for some of the earliest and most powerful Internet memes. 

Speakers also included Andrew Benson and Mitch Trale.

"...2005 to now has been the emergence of the ego GIF I like to call them. These GIFs are not concerned with the design of the site they appear on, it is a new meme that expects credit or wants fame in some way, often dealing with cute animals, pop culture or selfies in the midst of a satirical culture."

"So that brings us to what the spirit of the GIF is, and for that matter, what the spirit of the World Wide Web is. GIFs are one of many characteristics of the early net along with MIDI, IRC networks, Geocities websites, etc. What these things all have in common is the author-free distribution, open communication and freedom of publication. And what the initiators of the web intended was the free and unlimited access to information and communication."

"China, Cuba and Iran are the top three countries with the least amount of digital rights and the highest amount of internet surveillance. The US is ranked fourth. If the internet was full of "Welcome to my homepage!" slogans run my lovers of the internet instead of icloud database syncs run by techie dot.com ambitions, net surveillance would be null. This is the mass media web and commodity-fetishism."