sometime in mid 2022 [estimated], a friend of mine sent me the following gif:

this gif quickly became a favorite of mine, as i had just began to collect graphics for my own personal use. i have since dubbed it "hazmat.gif"

over time, i became fascinated with this gif, and its associates:

if you know me, or you've just taken a look around my site, you know i love these gifs, and i also kin/identify with hazmat suits on an incredible level. i love them and other forms of PPE, and i find them very interesting.

i also began to develop an interest in GIFs and other forms of media in general - who made these graphics that we take for granted?

thus began the search for hazmat.gif - or rather, the search for the individual[s] that made it and its cohorts. i began this endeavor sometime in late 2022-early 2023.

obviously, i began with reverse image search sites like TinEye. here's what comes up when you run the image through:

the earliest of these searches comes from april of 2008 - so, obviously, i know this GIF is old [i even remember finding it on gifcities at some point, but now i don't know how to pull it back up again], at least i have some kind of time frame for when it could have been made now.

all of the sites listed here were defunct - so it meant i had to go to the wayback machine to try and pull them back up.

the first lead i had came in the form of a... czech forum site, apparently.

webfetti was once one of those toolbar/cursor tools that was crazy popular during the earlier days of the internet. it was [i assume, since "webfetti" directs to their wiki page] Mindspark Interactive Network, which developed various applications, many of which were notably classified as malware that was hellish to get off your computer.

yeesh.

unfortunately, after some digging around, i couldn't really find anything else - i've seen some download links for webfetti, but i doubt they're actually the real deal, since MIN dissolved two years ago in june, and even if they were i'm not gonna kill my laptop for this. so, that's a bit of a dead end.

neither of the other links provided anything conclusive, either - one was a news report about an incident in china, and another was some guy's avatar on a separate forum.

alright, so - hazmat.gif doesn't lead to anything conclusive, and i didn't find anything running it through other search engines.

what about the other gifs?

the links themselves were dead, but i went to clipart.com itself, and...

finally, i got a real lead.

sorry for the image having a weird-ass alignment. i'll work on it.

so, i first found clipart.com in my search several months ago.

clipart.com is a website owned by Authentic Creatives, LLC. it, well, sells subscriptions that give you access to clipart, which explains the use of hazmat.gif and co scattered across the internet - it's royalty free, so you don't have to really be bothered about copyright, and official sources can use it freely.

and you can for sure find the hazmat gifs on here. see what pops up when i search "radiation".

bam! it's hazmat.gif - or, clipart #10840. [i prefer hazmat.gif]

it's even licensed, and it comes in .jpg form, too! but GIFs are better than JPGs, so i don't care about the JPG.

and you'd think that'd be the end of it - i found its presumable source, right? case closed!

wrong. i'm a pedantic and nosy motherfucker who can never be satisfied.

let's go back to tineye, and to the original clipart.com links, and run them through the wayback machine.

keep in mind: i know at some point, these gifs existed on the old clipart.com i am about to show you, because i saw them on there doing some digging before i began working on this blog post. i don't know why i can't find them now, though, but they were there!

alright, so clipart.com existed in 2003 - under a different company name, with an obviously different theming.

skip ahead some more.

a later version of the site in 2009 specifies that jupiterimages is a Getty Images company. if you don't know what Getty Images is, it's a pretty big company for royalty-free images - if you've seen any site that's posted some stock photo or royalty free image, there's a big chance it's from the Big Getty. [they also have a lot of copyright controversy going on. that's not what this is about.]

in 2010, they drop the jupiterimages label entirely:

and in april of 2014, we see a bare site, with this message at the bottom:

somewhere in 2021, the site changed hands from Vital Imagery LTD. to Authentic Creatives LLC. since they kept their facebook, my running theory is that they just changed names.

and i found this while scouring wikipedia about clipart.com:

so you might be asking me: "what the hell is the point of all of this? why keep going on? you already found out where the GIF is from."

well, because i don't think i'll ever know who actually made hazmat.gif- the person and not the company, and i thought showing the way the website has been tossed around over the years, never given any faces to their names [except for Vital Imagery LTD.'s takeover], shows this well.

here's the thing - the internet is massive. we all know that. there's so much that's being lost every single day. we will never know the faces of some of the people who have made various gifs and memes we take for granted.

and i'll never get to meet the person who created one of my favorite gifs of all time. i don't even know when hazmat.gif was made for certain, i just have a specific timeframe. i don't know who created art for clipart.com, all i know are the companies that ran it, and two of the people in charge of it at some point in time.

and maybe the creator wasn't the creator anymore, legally, once their work got into the hands of clipart.com, but maybe i'd know who they were - at least be able to put a name to them - if they had been given proper credit.

because that's the issue with all lost sources these days. people will pass around graphics and memes and art and videos and never give a name to them. and as all the media spreads, the people behind them vanish.

everyone deserves to be credited for their work, even some artist working for a clipart company who made a single series of gifs. because every piece of art is important and valuable. a child's drawing of a flower is just as significant as the mona lisa because of what the drawing might mean to others.

hazmat.gif is important, because i care about it, and i'm in love with it, and i hope one day i'll be able to know the artist who made it, even if it's just ultimately a pipe dream.

i hope whoever made hazmat.gif is alive, and i hope they're doing well. and i hope every other nameless artist i find while looking up things on GifCities is alive and well, and i hope everyone whos art has been passed around without credit is doing well, and i hope every artist knows that their art is valuable.

everything is worth archiving, and it's a tragedy that simple things like this are doomed to be forver an enigma.

i hope that one day, we'll live in a world where nobody goes unrecognized for their work.

want to ask questions, share ideas, or discuss this post/hazmat.gif and other unknown creators? email me at moethman@proton.me or check me out on tumblr @moethman

mothman signing off. goodnight <3