The GIF Turns 30!

June 15, 2017 by GIPHY Arts

GIPHY Arts celebrated the GIF’s 30th birthday online and IRL! We produced Time_Frame, an IRL exhibition of GIF Art, made historyofthegif.com, and had a Twitter Party at #HappyBirthdayGIF!

You can read more about Time_Frame here and the rest below!

GIPHY Arts collaborated with Computer Lab, Kevin Roark, Celine Katzman, and Michael Worthy to produce historyofthegif.com, an interactive timeline describing noteworthy events in the file format’s history and featuring interviews with artists Olia Lialina, Jacob Ciocci, Petra Cortright, and Eva Papamargariti.

historyofthegif.com spans 1987 – 2013, beginning with Steve Wilhite inventing the Graphics Interchange Format compression algorithm at Compuserve and concluding with Alex Chung founding GIPHY. From then on. . .history is in the making!

On Thursday June 10, 2017 GIPHY invited everyone on Twitter to celebrate the GIF’s 30th birthday by tweeting #HappyBirthdayGIF and sharing their all time favorite GIFs. The hashtag trended nationally in the United States and reached over 500 million people. Can’t wait for next year!