Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.
The Anipoem is a very young art form created by Argentinian artist Ana María Uribe. It’s kinetic typography with an onomatopoeic effect, as the letters used approximate the sound of the item or action they picture. In the ’60s she began her practice with concrete poetry—what she calls Typoems—in which a piece’s form relates to its content.
Being a relatively early adopter of the Web (she still maintains a site on Tripod) enabled her to work with spaces that were infinite yet at the same time could only be viewed in small chunks, like looking out a window at rest of the world. But infinite space can bring out a longing for containment, and artists now generally treat the Web space as if it is no larger than a typical monitor. In 2006 she was quoted on Nouvelles Technologies:
“In 1997, I bought my first computer and started ‘Anipoems’ or animated visual poems for the Internet. These at first maintained most of the restrictions of the earlier Typoems: they never exceeded the size of the screen, so you did not have to scroll up and down, they were in one font only, and until 2000, they were all in black and white.”
She now works in color, including her recent series of erotic typography.
This GIF, which we discovered on Anatol Knotek’s Visual Poetry Tumblr, dates back to 1999 and is called Zipper 3 in a series of six. Uploaded Tuesday night, it has 421 notes, which just shows the power of Tumblr vs. Tripod.
