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# Turn GIFs into Glitch Art
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/turn-gifs-into-glitch-art/
- Published: 2013-02-27T12:00:29.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:35:39.000Z
- Description: With the launching of Vine and the increasing ease of shooting portable video, you might be a little tired of the GIF. It’s so short! So looping! There’s no sound! Fortunately, Tim Baker and Chris Shier have come up with a way to freshen up your GIFs — by melting them.
- Author: Kyle Chayka
- Tags: Opinion, GIF, Takeshi Murata, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:51 (2012, 2013, part 1)

![GIF captures from gifmelter by Hyperallergic](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/02/gifstrawberries.png)

All GIF captures from gifmelter by Hyperallergic

With the launching of Vine and the increasing ease of shooting portable video, you might be a little tired of the GIF. It’s so short! So looping! There’s no sound! Fortunately, Tim Baker and Chris Shier have come up with a way to freshen up your GIFs — by melting them.

Their [gifmelter](http://csh.bz/gifmelter/?ref=hyperallergic.com) is a website and a bookmarklet that turns any GIF into a psychedelic haze, blowing out the images’ borders into a rainbow of pixels. The resulting aesthetic has a lot in common with the datamoshing practiced by artists like [Takeshi Murata](http://www.youtube.com/results?search%5Fquery=takeshi+murata&oq=takeshi+murata&gs%5Fl=youtube.3..0l3.1248.3787.0.4119.14.9.0.0.0.0.363.1929.0j6j1j2.9.0...0.0...1ac.1.Wkf6y3BtndE&ref=hyperallergic.com) and [Yung Jake](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS7QvOX8LVk&ref=hyperallergic.com), who warp the integrity of digital files to create surreal effects. Check out Murata’s “Monster Movie” below.

Combine gifmelter with the new GIF-focused search engine [Giphy](http://giphy.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com) for maximum effect. Guaranteed, you’ll never look at a GIF quite the same way again. Just pop a URL into their site and watch as it bleeds into a tiled background, blurring into abstraction. Now all we need is a plugin to turn GIFs into the backgrounds of Jackson Pollock paintings. Anyone?

![gifmelter_cat](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/02/gifmelter_cat.png)

![gifmelter_beyonce](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/02/gifmelter_beyonce.png)