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My journey started when I discovered Gifcities. An animated GIF search engine created by the internet archive that lets you search for gif files on archived geocities pages. It started as a fun trip down memory lane, but soon I found that certain gif characters belonged to larger sets. This made me curious on who created these gif sets and why. Gifcities often lets you visit the source website of the GIF when you click on it. This will usually lead you to a personal website. Sometimes I would find more gifs from the same set this way, but rarely would I find an original source or any information on who created the GIF. If you're looking for animated GIFS in the pixel art style that was more popular in asia and is featured more prominently in this exhibition, I recommend you to not search for 'cat' or 'dog' on Gifcities. Japanese translations like 'neko' or 'inu' won't get you very far either. What worked best for me was to type short asian phrases like 'taka','ryu' or 'chen' because most gifs are labeled by the name of the website. This will not give you any specific results, but it will get you a lot of hits, from where you can visit lots of personal sites from Geocities users like from Hong Kong or Singapore. Gifcities will enable you to collect GIF sets, but I not a great way to discover original source pages. |
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Among the several image search engines, I found Tineye to be the best at finding sources for old, small image files. You might think that Google and Bing could be of help with their reverse image search tools, but I found results there to be quite disappointing. Tineye can not find images if the source image is very small, which is inconvenient when looking for these specific web materials. But medium sized gifs can be used to find sites featuring the same GIF file. More often than not the sites that Tineye finds are no longer accessible, but this can be overcome by entering the URL in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Through Tineye I found a few websites that collected animated GIF files back in the heydays that are still up. Some examples of this are Animatedimages.org and Icone-Gif.com. These sites can help you to find GIF files in a specific category and helped me expand some collections, but once again these sites do not credit any sources. It did not answer the question of who created these materials. |
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One very important source for finding and learning more about the free materials scene is the Webclipart page of About.com. For those of you who consider themselves millennials you probably remember About.com as an important resource during the early internet days. Before search engines were good and before people on social media curated content, about.com was a good starting point to dive into anything you wanted to know more about online. They had an excellent page dedicated to web clipart in the days when the demand for web materials was high. Not only so they keep a big archive full of free to use gifs, but they also feature a lot of original content creators largely from the west, but sometimes also from the east. As with most About.com pages, this page had a curator called Bobbie Peachey. I am not entirely sure whether she is still with us at the time of this writing, as she does have a Linkedin profile online, but there is also an obituary page for a Bobbie Peachey from 2020. Both the Linkedin page and the obituary page refer to someone from Arizona. For the sake of this writing I will refer to her in the present tense but do correct me if that needs to be changed. Bobbie Peachey seems to be an influential figure as someone who both collected web clipart resources and created them herself. She is a webdesigner and was working for About.com until 2012. I think she is a very cool person as someone who found her passion in webdesign at a relatively late age. Her Featured Websites and Best of the Net pages have been a very important way for creators to get the recognition for their work in a world where mentioning sources seems to not have been common practice, often to the frustration of creators. In 2024 these pages are an amazing archive of hundreds of early web materials creators as you can visit a lot of the featured site on the internet archive. |
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This webring existed for Japanese creators of free web materials back in the day and consists of hundreds of links of sites where you can find original content to decorate your website with. Within the context of this project, finding this webring was a huge deal for me as it was the gateway to finding a lot of great sources. However, it must be mentioned that a lot of websites have not been archived well enough to be presentable. The better preserved sites are some of the ones featured here in the exhibition. The keywords that will help you searh for web materials on the Japanese internet are: "素材" or "sozai" in western writing. Sozai translates to materials. "素材" in combination with "GIFアニメ" (GIF anime) will increase your chances of finding moving images. The website translation tools that most web browsers have nowadays can help you navigate your way through the pages if you can't read Japanese. |
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Last but not least I need to mention the Internet Archive. It takes great vision to start preserving the internet as early as 1996. Long before most people saw the historical value of web 1.0, the Internet Archive team did. If I were not for them creating this exhibition page would have been largely impossible. If you value their work as much as I do, consider making a donation to the Internet Archive as they are a non profit organisation. |