
The 1,000-Year GIF - prismatic
http://hyperallergic.com/237627/the-1000-year-gif/
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erre
This reminds me of "Machine with Concrete", by Arthur Ganson:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-
tvxEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg)

From the video description:

    
    
      Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by 
      1/50th. Since there are 12 pairs of gears, the final speed 
      reduction is calculated by (1/50)12. The implications are 
      quite large. With the motor turning around 200 revolutions 
      per minute, it will take well over two trillion years before 
      the final gear makes but one turn. Given the truth of this 
      situation, it is possible to do anything at all with the 
      final gear, even embed it in concrete.

~~~
ewindisch
Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has a similar gear reduction setup attached
to a hand crank on one side and a metal trash can within a vice on the other
side. Children (and adults) are invited to crank the handle and turn the
gears. It takes months to crush each can which is then replaced.

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acomjean
One wonders if the museum looses power, will it start over?

There was a mac program that after you entered your birthday would tell you
how many seconds you have to live (estimated). It was a little disturbing. But
even if you closed it, it would keep counting (by storing the date you
entered), so it never could be reset. I'd open it again occasionally. The
computer it ran on is long gone (Macos 8 era machine).

Time is relentless.

~~~
yoha
> the artists will store a mother file somewhere and create many iterations of
> the loop in various locations — and if one fails, it may be easily
> synchronized with, and replaced by, another.

~~~
ifdefdebug
200 years from now, if I was still alive I'd be surprised if anybody gave a
shit about that.

~~~
tsotha
It's likely everyone will have lost interest and shut the thing down in 200
days.

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jkot
So basically it is animated GIF counter. I am not sure if its a spoof or
serious art.

~~~
chippy
It was some well known artist who when confronted by a member of the public
about some modern art saying "That's art?! I could have done that!" replied
"So why haven't you?".

~~~
burkaman
I've never understood that reply. I like a lot of modern art, but obviously
the person in that conversation is just going to say "because it's pointless
and I have better things to do, and galleries won't pay millions for my large
blue squares".

If you want to convince someone of the value of modern art, you need to do
better than "this piece is important because the artist was the first to think
of this incredibly basic idea".

~~~
chippy
I think the key thing is not the idea, but the doing or making. A lot like our
industry - ideas are cheap - it's the execution, the making, which is
important. Is Twitter a stupid idea? Sure! Could my child have made it? Maybe!
Why didn't my child make it?

Good question.

~~~
burkaman
Is Twitter a stupid idea? Kind of, but if I had thought of it before anyone
else I probably would have given it at least a little consideration. But
you're right, I probably couldn't have made Twitter even if I wanted to. I
could make something that kind of looks like Twitter, but there's no way I
could have executed the way they did.

When people say "I could have done that" in a modern art museum, they mean
they literally could have done exactly that. I could paint a stripe on a
canvas in exactly the same way as Barnett Newman did. That doesn't mean it
isn't art, but asking "why didn't you do it?" is missing the point. I didn't
do it because, as I just demonstrated, I don't understand why it was worth
doing. "I could have done that" means "anyone could have done that, why didn't
the museum just make their own instead of paying millions for it?"

Usually someone familiar with the artist can explain that in the greater
context of the art world, it was a statement on whatever, and often those
explanations make sense and make the piece more meaningful. I just don't think
it makes sense to ask why I didn't do something without first explaining why
anyone would do it.

~~~
Nadya
Related:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire)

Apparently it was displayed upside down. /shrugs. I don't personally think it
matters how it was displayed. I don't think it is worth $200, let alone nearly
$2mm.

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julianwachholz
The real question is: How large is the file and where can I download it or the
script to make it?

~~~
BillinghamJ
While I'm not exactly sure as to the answer, I have some info which would be
helpful towards answering it.

The file contains 48,140,288 frames. There are only two colors - white and
black.

Only the very center of the image (where the number is) needs to be updated
for each frame. This area is 400x65 pixels, so up to 26,000 pixels could be
updated on each frame, minus the space between the numbers, etc., so I'd
guesstimate an average of 10,000 pixels changing each frame.

Each of those 10,000 pixels can actually only be one of two values, but each
occupies exactly one byte when uncompressed. So uncompressed (which GIFs
normally are not), it'd be about 481,402,880,000 bytes (~0.5TB), plus the full
first frame.

However, GIFs use LZW compression. While I do not know a lot about it, I would
guess it would probably do quite well in this case. Perfect 100% compression
would mean 1 bit per pixel rather than 8. But let's assume LZW would only
manage - say - 2 bits per pixel. That'd quarter the total size, making the
total about 120GB.

Of course, this all assumes that it is actually a single GIF, which I believe
is extraordinarily unlikely. I would expect it's actually rendered on the fly.

Edit: I'm also assuming that the overall image is actually 1280x960 as the
image in the article suggests.

~~~
gpvos
Compression can do _much_ better than 1 bit per pixel. As a quick test, I just
created a 1000x1000 single-colour GIF, which takes 1735 bytes.

~~~
BillinghamJ
Indeed, but that is single color. GIFs contain the differences between each
frame - not a whole frame each time. I was assuming 10,000 (of the ~1 million
total) pixels were actually changing, and must be changed to one of two values
- thus "perfect" compression for a single pixel would be 1 bit.

~~~
gpvos
_> "perfect" compression for a single pixel would be 1 bit_

I still don't see how that is a valid conclusion that follows from what you
wrote before it. It is an optimal representation of the data _before_ you
would apply any form of compression.

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andyjohnson0
The mention of Cage's _As Slow as Possible_ reminded me of Long Player [1] -
another similar project.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longplayer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longplayer)

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Zelmor
At the least it could have cats.

