«When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.» (Augusto Monterroso)
The paleonthologist’s job consists in retrieving traces of past living beings and analyzing them in order to reconstruct life, environments and the evolutionary implications.
I collected all the animated gifs I could find on the web that represent dinosaurs, prehistoric scenarios, trees and plants. Then I created a sort of habitat in which they live again, an animated gif as well.
Until fifteen years ago the few existing websites where studded with these little moving images, which repeated page to page, often used as decoration. In 1995 Internet hosted about 24.000 websites. By then it would be possible to explore systematically all the net, visualizing every single page and every single gif. Today this seems impossible, 1995’s web and its fragments look like prehistory to us.
Technologic progress contracts times and changes the perception, to perceive as remote the immediate past is what we are forced by the constant update made by technology. But it opens a glimmer to the poetic recover of obsolete technologies, to the development of an ecology of systems, of devices and of artifacts. A re-use which changes, inverts, builds or rebuilds sense.