The Sozai Museum started with a simple question: “Where do GIFs come from?” Three years ago when I started working on my website I played around on Gifcities.org and the amount and variety of pixelated characters amazed me. I found that certain characters were recurring in various iterations. They seemed to belong to a larger set of GIFs. I wanted to know if these were purchasable or if someone just made these and distributed them freely online. The more I researched the origins of GIFs, I came to the conclusion that animated GIFs were mostly made by amateurs. Hobbyists who spent days creating original characters one pixel at a time. They published them for free on their homepages, sometimes daftly called workshops or ateliers. In addition to making cutesy pixel art characters, they made all sorts of ornaments for decorating your personal website. Think buttons, lines, wallpaper tiles. Another thing I learned is that pixel artists in those days were overwhelmingly Japanese and a majority of them women. This is very unusual in the web 1.0 era, where the internet was a predominantly male scene. The Japanese describe their websites as Sozai or Materials (the literal translation of Sozai) pages. I believe the influence of Sozai artists on the visual language and signage of the early internet is overlooked. Through these discoveries I decided to focus this exhibition on Japanese creators and name it the Sozai Museum.
The Sozai creators scene in Japan was very lively in the late nineties. There were magazines, often related to PC owners and homepage making, that held competitions where creators could send their latest works to compete. Honorable mentions would be posted on creators websites like trophies. Of course, these awards helped significantly to draw netizen traffic to these Sozai creators websites. A good example of this can be found here on creator Sudasudako's website, where she kept all the mentions of her site and her awards. The creators of web materials usually did not consider themselves artists. Most likely is was considered a craft at best, a past-time at worst. Thus it can be said that Sozai are a kind of outsider art. Sozai have a distinct look and feel, created by the limitations of the medium at the time. The limited possibilities of illustration software, combined with the limited storage capacity computers and webhosting services provided, made tiny pixeladed GIF files the standard way to decorate websites in the web 1.0 era. Of course there are still pixel artists today and while it is quite hard to pinpoint exactly when Sozai creators stopped being outsider artists, we are certainly in a different era now than we were back then. A pixel artist today is making the conscious decision to animate in this style.
A final topic that I think is important to mention, is the constant struggle Sozai creators faced with copyright infringement. If you visit the former workhops of the creators, you will find disclaimer pages on almost all of them. While almost all creators offered their creations for free, most of them asked to at least be credited for their work. Also, creators often explicitly forbade people from using their Sozai commercially. The problem with asking kindly is that in the wildest of the internet, most people will ignore or not comply to such requests. I have found the images of Sozai creators on hundreds of pages and found that credit is rarely given. In fact, this is the whole reason why I started researching the origins of animated GIF characters. It is often incredibly hard to find out where a certain image or character originated from. Take Angel Sactuary for example. It took my almost a year to find this page! At first I felt the frustration that Sozai creators must have felt. You are almost powerless against the hordes of greedy netizens who come into your workshop, take the work you have spend a long time making and spread in online without mention of sources. It also felt like an injustice to me that these creators remained anonymous in the historical records of the internet. On the other hand, if it was not for the viral distribution of these GIFs, most of them would no longer exist today. Many of the Sozai creators workshops, like the aforementioned Angel’s Sanctuary, have been archived poorly, meaning that most of their work would no longer exist on the internet. Like with so many things in life, the knife cuts both ways.
If you took the time to read this introduction I want to thank you for your attention and wish you a pleasant time exploring the Sozai Museum!