Reading 1 - Panpan Deng

In Sally Mackay's article The Affect of the Animated GIFs, she discusses the difference between real world art and internet art. She argues that "the norm, the boundaries between artists and not-artists that confer status and hierarchy in the gallery and museum system" are not applicable in internet world. Even though those people whose blogs or posts involve art, they don't seem to refer themselves as artists. Because .GIF images are so easy to make and so widely applicable, basically everyone can make .GIF images. When I search "GIF maker" on several searching engines, I can get more than three web-based tools for .GIF images making such as gifmaker.me and gifmake . Besides, these webs, users can also make their own .GIF through software like Adobe. 

From my point of view, even though some of the .GIFs are from video clips, it does not necessary mean that the movie is better than the .GIFs. First and foremost, GIFs can contain the essence of the movie or the acting of the actors. One of my favorite parts of .GIF is that the viewers do not need to do anything to activate the .GIFs. They are all automatic and run for the loops forever. How many clicks can we save. Last but not least, the size of the GIFs helps to spread the GIF culture and make the boom in GIF possible. The website GIFRun is technically speaking an online public gallery. After people make their own "mini-cinema", they are free to put them on that web and share them with the rest of the world. Everyone can evolve and everyone is an artist.