Article Lead Image

The Morning GIF: Tick tock

Richie Pickwell counts off the seconds in this simple GIF.

 

Lorraine Murphy

Streaming

Posted on Aug 15, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 12:49 pm CDT

Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

It’s the face you wake up to every morning, measuring your life out in ticks, LED blinks, or an alien, radium-infused glow. The clock.

Relentless, inexorable, unchanging as it marks that most ephemeral of dimensions, the tick tock of the clock mocks us as it serves us. Every tick, every tock, reminds us that while the machine remains the same, we, pitiful bioware that we are, are now one full second older. Two seconds. Three…

Graphic designer and artist Richie Pickwell obviously struck a nerve, possibly one still in shock from the morning’s alarm, when he posted his “Time’s Ticking” GIF three days ago on Tumblr. It’s reminiscent of some of Anatol Krotek’s work in its minimalism and the play between textual and intertextual meaning.

It’s certainly resonating on Tumblr, having clocked a stunning 156,910 notes and counting.

Share this article
*First Published: Aug 15, 2012, 7:30 am CDT