By Jessie Scott
This article is adapted from a paper given at Contemporary Art and the Mediasphere on 4 December 2015, a symposium convened by Ian Haig at RMIT. The tumblr autotelia.tumblr.com was made to accompany the paper in lieu of a powerpoint, and many of the works referenced are linked to there.
http://n6jlv.tumblr.com/post/81300581447/if-this-isnt-art-then-what-is-it-if-this
I was asked to talk about Animated GIFs at a recent symposium held at RMIT – Contemporary Art in the Mediasphere. The topic appealed to me not because of my belief in the unique significance of animated GIFs as an art form (media-, contemporary- or otherwise), but because they are a deceptively useful little vehicle for any discussion of the disconnect between contemporary art and the contemporary media sphere, around which the symposium was loosely themed. They embody so many things about internet culture, and in a media landscape with a short memory and a swift format churn, they have remained more or less stable as a form over time, although their contexts and uses have altered.
The GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) was developed in 1987 by Compuserve, originally as a format that would allow you to transport multiple images bound in one file. The animation delay was added in 1989, and the < img > tag debuted in Netscape 2.0- allowing what we now know as animated GIFs to be seen online for the first time. The section of code that enabled that animation is the same to this day and is still contained in every animated GIF you view. Unlike video, which is subject to constant format drift, and whose earliest file formats are now unreadable, animated GIFs from the early 90s (think dinky ‘under construction‘ logos from Geocities home pages) will still display now as they did then. As such, animated GIFs are a basic unit and building block of internet culture as we have come to understand it.
The trade off to the accessibility of this most democratic medium, like with many online forms, is it’s lack of empirical quality. A GIF is limited to 256 colours and you have little control over how they are received at the other end with variation in internet speeds, hardware and browser versions combining to affect frame rates and colour rendering in infinite variation. However, being designed in the era of dial up modems, you can be assured that they will be viewable in almost all situations. And, within these formal limitations, there is a massive variety of creative, artistic and cultural uses of animated GIFs online.
A quick outline of just a handful of these genres:
Memes/Gags
This is probably the most familiar and popular genre of GIF. They are humorous and often about remixing and riffing on moments from pop culture. They are responsive to what’s happening now, currency being essential to their effectiveness, and participatory in that people tend to build on the joke over time, adding new layers as they go. Drake’s Hotline Bling is a great example of the GIF meme life cycle – it began with fans (or haters as the case may be) clipping bits of Drake’s awkward dancing from the film clip. The next wave involved the dancing being layered or remixed with other pop culture moments – mashed up with Mr Bean for example, or with added light sabres. People then started re-enacting the clip completely, or making animated versions. Eventually it drifted so far from its original form that it was a mere nod to the original. The life cycle had peaked and dissipated and some new fad had overtaken the collective attention span. It has been argued that Drake is a knowing participant in this culture and deliberately spikes his videos with GIF-able moments as he knows it increases his cultural cache and visibility online (presumably translating to album sales).
Moving Emoji
What I call Moving Emoji are isolated gestures that are used to punctuate or illustrate a narrow point, usually taken out of context i.e. taken from film and television, but not used to talk about film and television. Sometimes these are really obvious – such as Joaquin Phoenix doing the highly suspenseful thumbs down gesture from Gladiator, which could be used to emphasise your lack of interest in going out on Friday night, and preference for staying at home on the couch with Netflix and a bottle of wine, for example. And sometimes they are more subtle and nuanced, describing more ambiguous emotions or situations, contributing new grammar to our online lexicon.
Net Art
Net art has kind of gone down the rabbit hole since the 90s – far from being the techno-utopia that contemporary art migrated to, it is now a series of wholly self-contained communities that have dug deep into internet and new media culture, politics, ethics, aesthetics and forms. While some net art essentially mirrors and updates the strategies and modes of the media art of yore (Glitch Art being one example), much of net art is, ironically, fairly inaccessible to the average art punter. It is so self-referential that it’s basically unreadable if you are not part of it. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile or interesting, simply that I have a hard time saying much else about it!
GIF Art
What I loosely call GIF art seems to mostly be a sidebar for motion graphics artists, animators and other film & TV production types. It’s a bit of a catch-all that covers a whole range of stuff. There’s less of a sense of intellectual engagement with form or politics than with net art, and more of a concern with degree of difficulty, aesthetic complexity or technical prowess. You see a lot of trippy, psychedelic, geometrical, trompe l’oeil in this category, that is completely un-ironic and sincere. Some of it is quite enjoyable and some of it quite naff. Also lumped in here are hand rendered stop-motion animations, animated paintings and prints by ‘straight’ artists, and countless other more-or-less uncategorisable ephemera. This is actually kind of the guts of GIF as an art form: the not-quite-art, but not-quite-anything-else mass of the GIF body politic.
Ads/Web Design
Widely used, but completely differently to how I’m discussing it here, so I’m just leaving them aside.
Porn and Gaming
Again – also widely used, but I believe they are largely just specific themes of the genres discussed here. Simply acknowledging they exist.
Contemporary Art
Finally, contemporary art. It’s pretty low on the ladder, and a very small proportion of what you would call animated GIFs today. I cannot name a single contemporary artist of my cohort who is known for making animated GIFs (ironically or un-ironically), although many of us have made and shared them informally, or socially. Tom Moody and Petra Cortright are two examples of internationally famous GIF artists who have traversed net and contemporary art scenes, being quite successful in both, however there is generally not a huge amount of bleed between the worlds. Contemporary artists often talk about the internet without any awareness of net art, and net artists seem not to think about contemporary art much at all.
http://dead-club.tumblr.com/post/24644854209
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Some similar video formats that are worth name-checking in the same conversation as animated GIFS include: Vine, Instagram and Snapchat . They all share some expanded DNA with animated GIFs. They are video forms, locked to specific platforms, but in many ways they share (or try to emulate) the flexibility and accessibility of animated GIFs: they’re previewable; looping; short; mute (unless actively un-muted); shareable; low-res; native to social media; and crucially, embody a dispersed or complicated relationship to authorship, so that anyone may download, copy, or remix them without assumption of copyright infringement. They are deliberately open mediums, relying on eroded authorship to function.
So, that’s a bunch of notes on form and genre. Some more expanded thoughts I’ve had about animated GIFs follows below…
Animated GIFs are culture-building. They pepper our online conversations and exchanges, shared moments of pop culture and moving image patterned over our personal experiences and emotions. This effectively binds us (for good or evil) in a similar way to how Broadcast TV used to – providing shared reference points between disparate individuals and communities.
They imbue our net interactions and communication with a visual richness it is otherwise devoid of.
They are a place to rest the mind and the eye – a soothing loop that heals the fissures in our fractured attentions spans, as we flick endlessly from tab to tab.
http://claritaluzian.tumblr.com/post/136220380063/instant-diamond
These last two things combine to help cohere the jumble of ugly pages that is the internet into something seamless in our minds: taking us out of wherever we physically are, out of the ugly internet, and into a third space that is in communion with others online. Whether in real time or delayed, it is one of the things that makes the internet feel like a ‘place’, not just a series of discrete technologies and objects we are using in isolation.
You apprehend an animated GIF, you don’t comprehend it. If you have to think about it too much, it’s probably failed. By and large, it’s not a very contemplative medium, although it can be meditative.
There’s something creaturely about animated GIFs. Because they are self-playing, and looping, going on after you have stopped looking at them, they have a sense of agency about them. They feel biological in their motility, like single-celled organisms or sperm on a slide, a life-form miraculously spawned by the sterile internet. And there’s something weirdly comforting about watching them gently throb in the background of whatever else you are doing online.
By far the overwhelming characteristic of animated GIFs, despite their use in many commercial contexts, is that they are an example of autotelia. Autotelic activity is often associated with play – an activity that is performed for it’s own sake:
“Engaging in the activity is, in and of itself rewarding. From this perspective, playing basket ball in a team, with the goal being to win is not [autotelic], but shooting hoops by yourself is. The reward from shooting hoops may arise from the pleasure of getting better at doing the task [but that is not the goal].” –Dr Sergio Pellis, neuro-etymologist, University of Lethbridge, Canada, via email.
Autotelic activity is arguably an aspect of all art-making. It’s the part where you get into a rhythm or flow, when you are in ‘the zone’. It’s what Lewis Hyde calls work as opposed to labour, and what the Second Life anthropologist Tom Boellstorff calls “techne”. This is usually associated with the early stages of working on an idea or piece, or in the production of it, rather than the exhibition or outcome. It’s open-ended, does not have a goal, is inconclusive. It’s possibly what makes you do art in the first place.
As such, animated GIFs exist in constant movement, in the flow, residing in communication and communion. A lot of the stuff that happens on the web, the good stuff, engages autotelia: YouTube tutorials, torrenting, shareware, wikis, Second Life. These things exist not because of people’s generosity or desire to share, as they are commonly mischaracterised, but because of the inherent satisfaction, pleasure, sometimes but not always fun, that people derive from the busy work of doing them. Autotelia certainly exists in contemporary art – improvisational, participatory and developmental residencies all engage aspects of it. But inherently the art world is oriented to final statements – we talk about ‘finished’ and ‘well-resolved’ works, the word ‘developmental’ itself implying a mere step on the way to something more complete and refined, rather than an end in itself. These things certainly happen in galleries, but must always work against the inherent form of the gallery, the need to have a finished thing occupying and justifying space.
In terms of moving image, this aspect of animated GIFs has more in common with VJing, than video art in a gallery or film screened in a cinema. Although it can relate to both of those things, and maybe has nothing else in common with VJing. The autotelic nature of animated GIFs particularly emerges from the fact that their production, consumption and distribution loop is tight and enclosed online; that their main public outcome is also called ‘sharing’ as opposed to ‘exhibiting’ or ‘showing’; that exchange and flow are built-in to the format. Like other types of memes, animated GIFs are easy to view, download, remix, riff-on and respond to in kind. So you never really have to leave that pleasurable autotelic space.
I can spend hours trawling this stuff – this rich, complex, multi-layered form that spans decades, demographics and the globe, and as an artist that proclaims to “work across the spectrum of screen culture” I have to ask myself: why don’t I make animated GIFs? Why don’t I see animated GIFs being made and distributed by other artists of my cohort? Why haven’t we seen an animated GIF version of Tape Projects Flip/Lock project, for example? It would be so much cheaper and easier to produce than that analog bastard of a project was.
What set of circumstances have caused these democratic forms to proliferate in so many varied artistic circumstances online, yet avoid being truly comprehended or embraced by contemporary art? At least in this country, in this city? Is it because contemporary art still relies overwhelmingly on exhibition in bricks and mortar space, is goal-oriented and even at the ARI level, interfaced with the leaden 19th century museum, and 21st century forms of neo-liberalism? (A deliberately loaded question, I acknowledge).
Despite much interest in GIFs in recent years, contemporary art curators do seem to struggle at the basic level with how to present them (in a gallery). People have been asked to come to the museum with their laptops and devices to watch them together in space and time; to download an app to enable the scanning of QR codes framed and hung on gallery walls; one project went to the effort of collecting hundreds of animated GIFs from a wide range of sources as a sort of erstwhile history of the form, only to then inexplicably master them to 16mm film and screen them in a cinema, despite the whole collection being available on a tumblr (surely a more sympathetic and enjoyable way to view them). This production of awkwardness and redundancy in the curation of animated GIFs is almost always attributed to a curiosity to ‘see what happens’ when you format shift. As though it might miraculously bring forth new understandings of the same works, something it almost never does.
I’ve done this kind of thing myself, and I understand and forgive the impulse, which has perhaps been a necessary translational phase. But I also wonder if we are not simply unwilling to shed the comforting downward pressure that institutions exert upon our heads. Their sheer mass exerting a gravity and gravitas which traps us in the echo chamber of the white cube, where we still require art to be, to be consecrated and validated by our community. Ironically where it is also least likely to be engaged with, seen or critiqued.
And here is the internet, with all its free community enabling tools, its user-friendly, accessible forms to explore, and we basically ignore it. Have we been spooked by the net politics of the last decade- afraid to get our hands dirty in an over-corporatised web 2.0, ignoring the fact that the gallery system is equally problematic? I wonder if being so dystopian in recent times has done us any favours, or if it has rather led artists to turn away from online forms in all but the most ironic and distanced postures, falling back into conservative modes and wilful technological ignorance to avoid political pratfalls. I’ve been told by no less than four curators in the last year that they don’t know anything about video, and are intimidated by the technology of it: not something I would in this day and age be admitting to a video artist whose work you are about to show.
Perhaps this has also contributed to the polarising of net-art and contemporary art into their own separate, highly specialised corners, making both of them less interesting than they, intermingled, have the potential to be. Most contemporary art galleries’ engagement with the web is largely limited to their websites and social media pages, which are glorified events calendars – promotion and archival of things happening in the space. Artists generally unimaginatively follow this model with their own sites, missing the opportunity to creatively engage the form. West Space, Blind Side and West Space Journal are among a few locally who are using their bandwidth as exhibition, screening or commissioning sites and I wish more local ARIs (not to mention local institutions) would follow suit.
A medium is always entangled with its contexts, and animated GIFs, while not locked to any specific platform, are heavily identified with social media platforms, that yes, are problematic. Do we ignore those contexts, integral though they are to the form, particularly the social/sharing and autotelic aspects of them, in an effort to keep them in the ‘pure’, hyperbaric chamber of the white cube?
I’ve spent the last year teaching video students at RMIT to understand the whole context of video: as emerging from the television industry, its intersections with cinema, as a vernacular web form, as not just some magical apparition that lives only in the vacuum of the gallery. I would think we can engage with internet forms like animated GIFs in a similarly critical and knowing way, and still be creative and talk about something other than their politics with them. There is an historical pattern of media arts swinging from utopian to dystopian positions – I think we’ve been to both with the internet and it’s time to find some useful middle ground.
Finally, putting my money where my mouth is, I started making animated GIFs. They’re not very good. Turns out, surprise surprise, that it’s actually very hard to make a good animated GIF. You can’t just throw together a bunch of stills, press “animate”, and hope for the best. At these frame rates and speeds, micro-seconds make all the difference, graphical relationships become really important, nano-narratives require exquisite conciseness. Maybe this will be the beginning of a beautiful new career? Hmm…don’t hold your breath, but DO watch this space for the animated GIF Flip/Lock, because that actually is happening. If you have an animated GIF or a short piece of sound you would like to contribute, get in touch!
Picture Skew 