Intro to Unacceptable


Last weekend I had the honor of attending and participating in Across the Generations: Legacies of Hope and Meaning, a conference sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics at Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus. I gave a presentation called The Art of the Animated GIF. Taking part in the conference proved both exhilarating and humbling. Exhilarating in that it gave me an opportunity to showcase my work, humbling because it made me cast a cold eye (to paraphrase William Butler Yates) on my work and, therefore, on my life. I must confess I am now very conscious of the fragility/tenuousness of both the animated GIF format and the web as a medium. As a format, animated GIFs are basic to the point of being primal, truly raw. Of course, therein lies their appeal to me artistically and their limitation technically. The web has also proved to be a two-edged sword. It allows quirky artists like myself to put their work out into the world, but at the same time it is a vast expanse where distribution of content is so completely decentralized that making money off one's art is extremely difficult. The pieces I created for Illumination Gallery using the poetry and image of Harlean Carpenter exemplify what I love about creating art for the web. Unacceptable animates Harlean Carpenter's poem of the same name. When I first read this poem it spoke to me very deeply. I animated it, along with an image of Harlean. On some browsers, because it has over 400 frames, the animation may initially run jaggedly, but it soon takes off at its intended rather rapid rate. Unacceptable runs perfectly on Firefox.


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