Imagine walking down the street and instead of seeing graffiti, you see a GIF. A blinking, whirling, colorful GIF.
On the streets of London, creative duo Guus ter Beek and Tayfun Sarier put a picture frame around an iPad, locked the screen to display a GIF, then taped the tablet to various walls and telephone booths around the city. Why? For fun, the friends tell Mashable.
Hyper-colored animations of glitchy rainbows, pizza and cartoon characters colored the streets, causing passersby to stop and take notice. After recording pedestrian reactions, ter Beek and Sarier would remove the GIF-ed up iPad and tape it on another street.
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During the day, ter Beek and Sarier work in advertising, but they enjoy creating art projects on the side, ter Beek says. They're constantly showing each other GIFs, and came up with the project as a way to "integrate the world of GIFs with our favorite hangouts."
They also used the project as a way to "disrupt" the everyday environment, ter Beek says. GIFs were also chosen to reflect their surroundings, for example, infinite hamburgers in a neighborhood full of franchises.
They're part of a larger trend of artists who use the Internet as their palette. "Net art," a term defining artists who use the Internet or net culture as their medium, has been around since 1994.
Using an assortment of tools, from YouTube videos to old school web design, like artist Michael Guidetti (whose website looks like an orderly series of HTML code at first), these creatives find inspiration online. Visual artists like Jon Rafman and Emilio Vavarella have created stunning works out of images found on Google Street View.
Though some net art is subject for mockery, the highbrow art world has welcomed it; an early example comes from the Whitney Museum of Art, which commissioned digital and net art for an online archive in 2002.
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Sarier and ter Beek are not the first to get creative with GIFs. It's a popular form that many art spaces love, such as the Photographer's Gallery in London and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.
Artist Matthew Rader, who creates animation and GIF art with wife Pamela Reed, told Mashable in 2012 that "animated GIFs are the true artistic medium of the Internet."
Here are five other artists who think so, too.
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