2021 ยท Website
An archival project collecting 100,000 90s GIF images from the web, collected in 2021. I was interested in these GIFs because they capture the hopes and dreams of their era; they are icons of the things that people on the early web wanted to include on their websites. At that moment in time I felt they were at risk of being lost, it turned out to be the right moment to capture them because a year or two later we started to see these kinds of images being drowned out by AI content. The GIFs are micro folk artworks, created by now unidentifiable individuals who gave their time and energy to make something that was both kitschy, powerful and contemporary to the time they were created.
The gallery is a play on the white-cube aesthetic; with the GIFs removed from their context and presented in random rooms with imaginary sponsor names. Each room is randomly generated and is likely to be unique; you may be the only visitor who will ever see one particular curation of GIFs collected together; in this way both the GIFs and the gallery become ephemera of the internet.
