"The GIF That Keeps On Giving: an interview with Roarlivia"
The bitmap image format aka the Graphics Interchange Format aka the GIF is a staple food for any serious online image devourer. A handy file carrying up to 256 colours per frame, one that delivers a highly compressed, simple and often hypnotic animation, it’s also capable of being shared via social networking and microblogging sites such as Cinemagram and Tumblr. The GIF was introduced by Compuserve on June 15th 1987, making the 25-year-old format older than many members of its youthful hip plugged- in audience.
Since 2007 Tumblr has served as the microblogging site of choice for a huge number of users posting up links, comments, quotations, photos, drawings and yes, GIFs. It truly is staggering: as of August 20, 2012, Tumblr has over 69.4 million blogs and more than 29.8 billion total posts. These blogs are home to many millions of GIFs all squirming, flashing and undulating their way across the world’s screens. On the lookout for a paradigmatic GIF artist, I happened upon the Tumblr posts of Olivia Fox aka Roarlivia:
How long have you had your Tumblr page?
April 2010, I knew it was going to be a slow summer and I wanted to do something productive.
What’s its purpose, if any?
It’s a semi-organized space to put my artwork publicly. It’s fun, I can post unfinished pieces or different variations or stuff I’m unsure about with little to no pressure.
Is your Tumblr page related to your general art/design practice?
As a (mostly) digital artist I can use my tumblr page as a sketchbook. I don’t really like showing my actual sketchbook to people partially because I’m not happy with my drawing skills, but mostly because I don’t think it accurately represents what I spend my time making. I feel more comfortable sending people to my tumblr page for them to scroll through and get a taste of what I’m about.
How do you make your GIFs - what software do you use, how much time and effort goes into making them, what purpose do they serve?
I make GIFs in Photoshop. A lot of the time the effort doesn’t come from the GIF making process. A GIF can be used as a short snippet of a larger video or animation piece, in that case the time was spent on the original video. What’s cool about that is these preview GIFs can sort of stand apart as their own piece. Sometimes I’ll take footage or make an animation in After Effects or pull a video off YouTube and bring some of the frames into Photoshop, from there I can edit the frames individually and make it totally different from the source. There are also specific pixel and color algorithms unique to GIF making that are fun to explore. There are endless program and effect combinations to experiment with. Like any medium GIFs have their own set of conceptual abilities and limitations.
Do you find Tumblr useful as an art network and/or social network?
Yes to both! It’s very easy to get jaded and bogged down by popular websites, it’s important to keep criticizing these sites and how we use them, but I’ve actually managed to use Tumblr to find some amazing artists and friends. This has been true with other social networks and programs I’ve used in the past, but Tumblr has a way of helping you find people extremely relevant to your interests. It’s like an online convention, our sites serve as tables. We’re showing our work or collected goods to each other, talking, and trading.
Can you recommend any other Tumblr pages and/or GIF artists?
Max, the King maxcapacity.tumblr.com I’ve been following him for years, I still get giddy when he likes one of my posts. My favorite contemporary digital artist Jaakko Pallasvuo www.dawsonscreek.info My best friend Kim taught me how to gif back in the day when it was somewhat harder magicalbagofcats.tumblr.com/tagged/art
Friends forged IRL through mutual admiration of each other’s work/tumblr posts:
ala-bas-ter.tumblr.com, adactivity.tumblr.com/tagged/mystuff, b-m-f-u.tumblr.com, suffervacation.tumblr.com, plslala.tumblr.com, thespithouse.tumblr.com, negativepleasure.tumblr.com, spacecrystal.tumblr.com, abandrewart.tumblr.com.
Great GIF artists: www.unomoralez.com, francoisegamma.computersclub.org, newvisiontechnology.tumblr.com, noirlac.tumblr.com, fmtownsmarty.tumblr.com, dataerase.tumblr.com, torngarsuk.tumblr.com. I’m gonna go ahead and mention www.dump.fm too.
Olivia Fox is somehow a printmaking student at Purchase College, State University of New York. She works as an assistant in various large format digital labs, as a digital archival assistant for a library, and at a cafe. She likes weird manga and has dreams of making a comedy show. Her Tumblr is at http://roarlivia.tumblr.com