If the GIF community were a modern-day society, Oct. 26, 2009, would be one of the bloodiest days in its history.
That’s the day GeoCities, a popular Web community, closed down after 15 years. Since 1994, netizens have used it to blog about their favorite TV shows and share garish, seizure-inducing animations.
Thankfully, Nick Kegeyan, 18, a new-media student at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, has preserved many of these dialup-era relics in a 25GB folder of images on his desktop. He uses this collection as inspiration for extracrispy, his Tumblr blog, which hosts original GIFs reminiscent of GeoCities’ 1990s heyday. The palette: bright colors, 3-D, and surreal elements like a head floating in empty space.
The following are Kegeyan’s five favorite GIFs and what was going through his head when he made them.
“This gif is the product of a heated debate and inspired by an awesome movie. It is essentially what happens when two people can’t figure out what the pringles slogan is and after the confusion, re-watch the Noe’s trippy movie Enter the Void and make a gif from those experiences. The title comes from an infomercial promoting a strip club in New York City, ‘Gallagher’s 2000.’ It never fails to freak me out, especially at 3 am when I’m falling asleep with the T.V.”
“A lot of my ideas for GIFs come from random Facebook statuses and this ‘Friday night’ status is consistently one of my favorites. I hadn’t seen anyone post a status asking if ‘anyone wanted 2 chill tn?’ or its alternatives, like ‘wuts good 2nite?’ in awhile until it happened a couple months back. This gif is an homage to these statuses. May you forever be lonely and weird.”
3) Untitled
“I don’t really remember the story to this one, but what I do know is that ‘Mercy’ by Kanye, was and still is an awesome song. When i woke up in the morning this gif (and another version on a black background) were on my desktop with a sticky that said “to tumble”…I guess the lesson here is drunk gifs beat drunk texts.”
“I’m going to explain this one using awful math skills: 3d chicken model + listening to a lot of ASAP Rocky + trying spicy chicken mcbites for the first time + my girlfriend having appendicitis (and that being lame) = Ferg the trill-ass chicken.”
5) Double fudge
“This one is kind of comes out of a simple thought process, like a bunch of other ones I’ve made. I was watching a lot of Taco Bell commercials for this massive video I intended to make and in the end, I got bored and decided it wasn’t worth it. Instead, I thought it would be cooler to have floating taco bell food on shelves. I think I was right. The title comes from Judy Bloom being an awesome author and influencing my childhood with her series of “Fudge” books.”
Image by Nick Kegeyan/Tumblr
