The animated GIF has been traveling, making appearances in cities as it goes along. As cosmopolitans, we can kind of get with When in LA(Opens in a new window)‘s faux blasé attitude about celebrities and, every once in a while, Chicago’s So Yeah Duh(Opens in a new window) makes us laugh (um, with them). Though we’re reaching Shake Shack saturation in New York, we can recall the early days and relate to D.C.’s elation(Opens in a new window). We must admit that we don’t find Toronto Strife(Opens in a new window) funny, though that’s probably because of the language barrier.

Hey, girl, you know you’ve seen some of these GIFs(Opens in a new window) before. Celebrities star in animated GIFs across the Internet. The parts they play are made up of supporting roles(Opens in a new window), main attractions(Opens in a new window), and, um, parts(Opens in a new window).

Animated GIFs are not just in style, they’re influencing it. Prada picked up Vahram Muratyan(Opens in a new window) of Paris Versus New York fame to design its Parallel Universes campaign(Opens in a new window) that it says merges “new communications media and Prada’s semiotics.” Fashion, is there no better place for everything old to be new again?

Live tweeting took on a new meeting when Burberry tweeted runway looks(Opens in a new window) as animated GIFs during London Fashion Week this past February.

They’re even in on the joke in the fashion world, with an announcement by Ford Models(Opens in a new window) this past April Fools that their model comp cards would get animated. Ford said they had “exclusive rights to an all new, highly advanced nanotechnological microarray printing process with sub-micron positional accuracy that will realize the heretofore impossible feat of printing a fully animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) image to card stock paper” and they posted the video to prove it. Because in fashion, they know images don’t lie.

You’d think that MOVs would shun GIFs the way that the Oscar-nominated rarely deign to walk the Emmy red carpet. Now stars of stage and screen might get invited to the Webbys. (Quel nightmare!) Conceptual art project Idle Screenings(Opens in a new window) edited entire movies like The Hangover, Inception, and The Dark Knight into animated GIFs “to investigate content containers as content, the ubiquity of consumer access to content, and the shift in the perceptual value of content as it is shared.” Idle Screenings had its last showing in March. If this brings out the critic in you, animated GIFs have you beat there, too, with this review of Battleship(Opens in a new window).

NYPL Labs’ Stereogranimator(Opens in a new window) brings history to life by harkening back to the animated GIFs ancestor, the stereograph. The stereograph was a pair of nearly identical photographs that, when seen through a stereoscope, would seem three-dimensional (and, just like now, copyright issues were often shoved to the side(Opens in a new window) in the process). The Stereogranimator takes images from the New York Public Library’s collection of stereographs and animates them. It also allows site visitors to recreate the technique.

Politics has gotten all technical and vice versa. So when the Internet fought back against SOPA, The Oatmeal used an animated GIF as its weapon of choice(Opens in a new window). Likewise, when Obama endorsed marriage equality, some celebrated with animated GIFs and some with orange mocha Frappuccinos(Opens in a new window).

The working life is the subject of every art form imaginable and it’s no different with animated GIFs. Several professions get the GIF treatment, including our own(Opens in a new window) with Real Talk From Your Editor (created by Ann Friedman of GOOD magazine, an editor, natch) and overtaxed fashion buyers(Opens in a new window).

For as worldly and as popular as they’ve always been, it was hard to say people were attracted to animated GIFs for their beauty. But Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg changed all that with their Cinemagraphs(Opens in a new window). The couple (she’s a photographer, he’s a visual graphics artist) transformed the animated GIF by isolating the movement to one transfixing spot of each dreamy photo so that viewers can feel the hypnotic rumble of a subway(Opens in a new window) even while the tunnel whooshes past.

Artist and illustrator Dain Fagerholm(Opens in a new window) has turned the animated GIF into a repository of Maurice Sendak-like nightmares inhabited by Yoshimoto Nara-esque waifs.

Photo credit: Cinemagraphs™ by Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg.

We saved the inevitable for last. The Internet is made of cats(Opens in a new window), so it only follows that animated GIFs are, too(Opens in a new window).