Welcome! In recent months I have been diving into the scene of free materials websites. It started out as a somewhat compulsive search to collect animated gif characters that I liked, but after a while I started wondering, where did all these gifs originate from? Who made them? The answer is that there were lots of enthusiastic hobbyists experimenting with pixel art in the late nineties. Creating lines, buttons, icons and characters only to share them with the world for free. The scene was especially big in Japan but seems to have peaked in the early 2000's. Once people moved from personal sites to social media profiles, free materials sites seem to have largely disappeared. A few sites still remain online though after all these years, and others have been well preserved by the Internet Archive. The goal of this exhibition is to introduce people to this scene which seems to have been all but forgotten, give some credit to the original creators of the wonderful works that most of them made without a profit motive in mind and to give some more background information about the free materials scene, both the English and the Japanese side of it will be discussed.
24-08-08: I'm taking a break from working on this project for a while. Please enjoy what is here, which is about 70% of what I intend to realize in the end.
