Blacksky
Blacksky
Year: 2023—2024
Dimensions: 216x216x5 px
Medium: Site-specific, Animation
Status: Completed
Links: Blacksky on Bluesky
Blacksky is a year-long animation project created on the Bluesky platform, where I posted one frame per day for 365 days. When Bluesky first launched, it did not support GIFs or video, which felt like a limitation for sharing animated work, especially for artists migrating from Twitter. Blacksky began as a response to that restriction, using the platform’s timeline as a frame-by-frame display and allowing the animation to reveal itself only through continuous scrolling.
What started as a technical workaround gradually became a personal challenge: committing to publishing a single frame every day for an entire year. The content of the animation is a timelapse of cloudy Dutch skies, based on footage I recorded through my window during the global pandemic. By stretching this movement across daily posts, the project shifts animation from immediate playback to slow accumulation, shaped by both the platform’s structure and the discipline of repetition.
A few months into the project, I realized that the date I posted the first frame, June 15, 2023, coincided with the 36th anniversary of the first GIF ever released. With that unexpected synchronicity, Blacksky became my small tribute to the GIF format.