The 1,000-Year GIF | Hacker News Reader

The 1,000-Year GIF

hyperallergic.com

60 pointsprismatic34 comments

This reminds me of "Machine with Concrete", by Arthur Ganson: 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.

You can see it at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

I feel like the artists think it is serious art

Agreed. Why not an animated clock? Or some progressive image like Towers of Hanoi being played? Or something, oh, artistic?

>Or something, oh, artistic?

The idea that there's something "special" that makes it "artistic" (little fluffy clouds a la Bob Ross maybe?) is the very basis of kitch.

Projection. Artistic means creative. Duplicating a static image (dates stenciled on a canvas) digitally is pretty lame. It takes only 30 seconds thought to do better than that. You can have your fluffy little clouds thank you; I'd like to see something fresh, or reimagined.

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?".

That was by some well known artist?

I was aware of the exchange, but I did not know it originated from a real conversation with a well known artist.

I assumed the conversation had been written, not just arisen during conversation.

Huh.

I think it was either Dali or Picasso or Duchamp or someone like that. That I am not at all sure makes me think it's probably someone else, and that the actual words were quite different - so I gave a vague source :)

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I don't know about your compression numbers. I just created a 1000x1000 pixel gif with a number 1 in the middle, and it compressed to 4790 bytes equals 38320 bits. So, 1,000,000 pixels divided by 38320 bits means 26 pixels per bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF suggests that long runs of a single color compress rather well.

Why would perfect compression mean 77.5% reduction? I've seen GIFs compressed 90%+.

Considering that the numbers look very pixelated we could probably reproduce the same result with a 7x7 pixel grid for each number (29 pixels for an full 8), after that we could just scale up the image to 1280x960 using a cheap nearest neighbour algorithm. That way we could probably get away with a lot less. Even rendering a full 88,888,888 could be done with 232 pixels then.

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.

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.

> "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.

> Only the very center of the image (where the number is) needs to be updated for each frame

For most frames, only the final digit needs to be updated (or the final two digits, etc)

Apparently, if you aim to serve the GIF over the internet, you can absolutely avoid creating the file at all. GIFs don't declare how many frames the file has, so the browser will keep loading GIF frames unless you declare that there are no more frames.

People have exploited this to create a hackish one-way websocket [1].

[1]: https://github.com/videlalvaro/gifsockets

I'm pretty sure people have exploited this in the 1990s to create a hackish webcam (a camera recording each frame as gif and the server "streaming" the individual gif frames as they come in).

You don't have to hack gifs to do this. The ability to indefinitely stream frames of an image (of any format) is part of HTTP.

I made a live png view counter for funsies with this idea: http://drewgottlieb.net/2012/07/29/real-time-user-count.html

12G, according to a [1]picture in the post

1. http://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ASLAP-on...

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

At the least it could have cats.

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