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Who’s the Boss?

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Clayton Shonkwiler:  Math Professor, Artist

“the unique thing about GIFs is that they treat time like a circle rather than a line” - Clayton Shonkwiler

There will be a a post on Cross Connect with more of Clayton’s work (link coming), or you can go to his website here.  He generously answered questions from me at length, which is what follows:

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Where are you located?  What do you do?  

I live in Fort Collins, CO, where I’m a math professor at Colorado State University.

Where are you from?  

I grew up in and around Boulder, CO, which isn’t that far from Fort Collins, but after high school I spent 15 years living in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and the UK before eventually making my way back to Colorado.

Do you have any art education or background?

Not really. I mean, I had the usual elementary school art classes, but one thing I definitely learned from them was that I have no innate talent for drawing or painting or working with clay.

I was interested in photography from a pretty young age, and convinced my dad to give me an old SLR that he had, but I mostly just took photos on vacations, not as an everyday thing. Somehow my middle school had a darkroom, so I did take a photography class in seventh grade that was really fun because you got to develop your own photos and the teacher encouraged us to do things like take long exposure photos of the stars. But that’s really it for my formal art education.

That being said, my mom was an art history major before becoming a librarian and my dad is an architect, so there were always lots of art and architecture books and prints around and we would always make a point of going to art museums or interesting buildings on trips, so I probably picked up a bit from that. My dad’s architectural drawings always seemed like an impossible ideal of straight lines and perfect measurements, but he designed the house I lived in until age 10, which was very different from any of the other houses I visited, so I did have a sense that those idealized drawings could be made real, and also that it was possible to get pretty creative even with something as literally everyday as a house.

Why do you make gifs?

Mostly because it’s fun. The first GIF I made was just intended to illustrate something in a research talk, but that planted the seed that it wasn’t actually that hard to make a GIF in code. The second GIF I made was to illustrate a hypercube for a geometry class I was covering for a colleague. It wasn’t actually that good, but it was compelling enough that I started getting the idea that maybe some of the math I knew could lead to interesting animations. For a while I was just trying to figure out how to turn every interesting math thing I knew into a GIF, and if you do that pretty much every day for a couple of years, it becomes part of who you are.

I think there’s also an aspect of laziness, honestly. The actual practice of making GIFs and of doing research (which is what I spend most of my professional time doing) is pretty much identical: both mainly involve typing code into a computer. So when I’m done working it’s just as easy to start a GIF as it is to check Twitter, which means I do it more than I would if it required going to a studio or heading out to walk around town with a camera.

Do you think that gifs are a unique art form?

Definitely. I tend to think about things geometrically, so to me the unique thing about GIFs is that they treat time like a circle rather than a line, and to me the most interesting GIFs are the ones where the looping is somehow surprising or clever. Looping animations obviously aren’t without historical precedent – think zoetropes and Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope – but the GIF format makes them vastly more accessible for both creators and viewers.

Which is not to fetishize the format too much: GIF is a terrible format in many, many ways, and at this point browsers support a lot of more modern ways of producing looping animations, from APNG to CSS and SVG animations, but until the big social networks support them they’re going to be niche options at best.

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