Animated gifs have come up for me three times this week. I know, the word might make you think of that chain email your aunt sent on back in ‘aught six. But no, not those: contemporary animated gifs.

1: The artistic

Found on superb culture curator blog Lost at E Minor, Brandon Jan Blommart’s series of Americas Most Haunted animated gifs are fascinating and soothing.

2: The ZOMG

Gawker’s feminist(ish) blog Jezebel made a roundup of dozens of a newish sort of animated gifs as sort of “Like using emoticons, on steroids!”* which you use in a comments forum when you want to applaud someone:

or tell them to shut up, or that you will kill them,

or just “whatever.”

*This is actually a reference to the static face reaction shots of myfacewhen but applies even more to these. The quote was introduced to me in a metafilter’s comment about the jezebel post by dreamyshade, who continues: “instead of having text abstractions stand in for our faces, they/we use other people’s faces to stand in for our faces when talking anonymously and virtually.”

3: The uh, professional

I made one, for a google ad for my day job at Speck. It featured these new super limited edition lowbrow creature art iPhone cases. But… it was 160k, much too large for a google ad. In an attempt to get it under their 50k ceiling, I saved a severely lossy dithered 16color version.

We didn’t end up using it because well, it is terrible. But! Strangely compelling, in a vhs reticulation Prince of Darkness nostalgia way. (If you concur, maybe post in the comments a nodding Ms. Jay or something).

Further reading:

Slate has an article on the Glorious GIF Rennaissance and Artfagcity calls 2010 The Year of the Animated GIF. Neither of these articles mention iOS’ continued nonsupport of Flash as a contributing factor to the renaissance, but I don’t doubt it: the first wave of animated gifs predated Flash and all but disappeared to livejournal and myspace for years once Flash hit the scenes.

And as for the retro cheestastic style of that first wave of animated gifs, if you’re still hungry for em, perhaps you’d like to watch that new MIA video? Frankly I couldn’t get through it…