GIF Trails for Night Vision

GifCollider Screenshot, 2019

GifCollider, Chapter 11: Night Vision was made for the Manges Collection in Berkeley in 2017. It has since been installed in various locations, including the Jewish Quarter Museum in Amsterdam. The project is a collaboration with Olya Dubatova, and it features GIFs from GifCities, The GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine (Internet Archive).

The shape of the menorah is anchored in the night vision of the Prophet Zechariah. In the text, Zechariah does not understand what he sees, and asks an interpreting angel about the meaning of the vision (Zechariah 4:1-14). This question about meaning also arises for us, when we are engaging in the complexities of our current lives. Night Vision’s computer-generated image traces the shape of the menorah in a sea of GIF animations from the Internet Archive, layering, moving, and blurring them to suggest stratas of digital memory. Above these layers, the program draws and redraws the basic shape of the menorah, the pipes and the two olive trees from Zechariah’s vision. The colors change from cycle to cycle and from day to day. The animations interweave the noise of contemporary life with the pure spiritual form of the menorah, and invite us to answer the same question that Zechariah was asked: “What seest thou?”

The code is a bit curious, and it makes use of gif libraries to render all frames of a gif animation on top of each other in an onionskin manner. I recently added a bit of interactivity. The project zip folder is large because it has to include about 400 gif animations that randomly travel across the screen.

All the glory is linked here: https://github.com/gregottoniemeyer/gifCollider