The GIF That Keeps on Giving

Hope you're in it for the long game.

Howdy! It’s Joey, back with more Fun Fact Friyay. Today’s fact is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it one, but first…

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Photo via Janne Särkelä (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The longest GIF in the world is called “As Long As Possible” and is designed to run for 1,000 years.

One of the great outcomes from the advent of the Internet is the introduction of the GIF. They’re like little movies that play on a loop, and they’re especially spectacular as reactions to odd things that happen in life.

For example, if someone showed you a squirrel rapidly eating an acorn in a tree (something I witnessed recently, with much admiration), you might respond thusly:

Okay, you’re on the Internet. You know what a GIF is. Engineer Steve Wilhite led a team at CompuServe, and they created the Graphics Interchange Format in 1987. Life was never the same.

There’s an endless debate on the pronunciation. Is it a hard “g,” like in “gift,” or is it a soft “g,” like in “gin?” Wilhite himself said it’s a soft g, because the name is an homage to Jif peanut butter.

That seems to hint that you’d pronounce “graphics” like “giraffe-ics,” but what do I know? I’m just someone who uses GIFs daily in my communiqué. I use a hard “g.”

Typically, you see the end of the GIF within seconds. Catherine O’Hara, as the whimsical Moira Rose, has said “delightfully unhinged” several times since you first laid eyes on her.

But not all GIFs are created equal. And in Finland, two artists just so happened to create the longest GIF you’ll ever see…well, at least part of it, because ain’t none of us living until it finishes.

Finnish artist Juha van Ingen, in collaboration with sound artist and developer Janne Särkelä, designed As Long As Possible (ASLAP). As the name suggests, it’s the longest GIF out there.

Each frame lasts for 655,090 milliseconds, which is nearly 11 minutes. There are a total of 48,140,288 frames in the GIF, so it will run for 1,000 years.

The first frame began at the Kiasma National Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki on March 28, 2017. That means it will end in 3017. Who knows how the world will be by then?

As for the GIF’s content? It’s, as you might say, very boring. It’s a blocky, pixelated white number on a black background; the number changes to indicate the current frame of the GIF.

The maintenance of the GIF is more entertaining than the actual GIF itself. The file was cloned and is running on six physical playback units across the world. Should one unit be destroyed or require an upgrade, a new unit will be built, with the animation file cloned and synchronized with the others.

If every unit gets destroyed, the GIF can still be salvaged via time capsules that have the original file, the GIF format specifications, the artwork description, and all the other necessary information to re-animate the GIF.

You might recall making time capsules during elementary school. We put things like a comic book or a cool-looking leaf in ours. I wonder if future generations will be more impressed by those or a GIF.