This museum started with a simple question: Where do animated GIFs come from?
In the web 1.0 era people started creating pixel art on their PCs. Creating GIFs, wallpapers, lines and buttons to share with the world for free. The scene was big in Japan and peaked in the early 2000s. Once people moved to social media sites, free materials, or sozai, sites have largely disappeared. A few online workshops remain online and others have been well preserved by the Internet Archive. The goal of the Sozai Museum is to introduce people to some of the works and creators from the web 1.0 pixel art scene and to complete and preserve GIF character sets made by unknown authors. Through my research I have been able to identify the creators of several GIF characters!
