Did anyone else notice the face in Frame 10 of the gif?

http://i.imgur.com/HP5onhg.png

I played around with the Game of Life a couple of days ago using this tool to try various changes to the game rules:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/golly/.  My overall takeaway was that I could find no obviously "interesting" patterns that naturally emerge from the initial whiterabbit state using any combination of game rules that don't immediately explode into endless growth or immediately disappear.

Also, I think I have to discount the general idea that you can predictably identify a GoL input state that will lead to an "obvious" output state (like a QR code or other non-trivial design).  After doing some more reading, it appears that GoL is similar in many respects to a hash function in that it is computationally unfeasible to compute the input needed to produce a specific output, which is what you would have to do in order to create a puzzle where you were trying to generate a "designed" end state.  (See http://nbickford.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/reversing-the-game-of-life-for-fun-and-profit/ )

It seems clear that GoL is a key component of the puzzle.  I think that an alternate possibility is that "what lies beneath" the gif frames might reveal a key for encoding / decoding data into GoL cells, maybe using some form of coordinates.  Anyway that's my best guess for now.