Standing at the Gates Fussing with Locks

@steffbao | steffanie-ling.com

At some point during the writing of this piece, I started pronouncing GIF properly, with a soft “g”—like gin, or gesticulate. Whenever it came up that I was writing about GIFs, people were not taking me seriously and likely thought I was compiling a listicle of artists whose GIFs would soon transcend the Tumblr Sphere. But if I told them how long it had to be and where it was being published, the pronunciation was to be my critical starting point but often given as a played-out joke. I had always pronounced it with a hard “g”—GIF this, and GIF that, and I kept mispronouncing it. I assumed that the first word in the acronym started with a “g” word that had a soft pronunciation—like general, or gender—but it doesn’t. The use of the soft “g” was arbitrarily decided by the developers as an homage to the brand of peanut butter, Jif. The pronunciation of the format seems to be the sole maxim that the GIF has advanced. Beyond that, discursively and aesthetically, it’s relatively open season, hence its appeal as an artistic medium.

Wielding the proper pronunciation indicates a learnedness that doesn’t match the temperament of its use (or for that matter, its etymology). In just over a quarter of a century, GIFs have become essential to a toolkit for digital communications and social media communion. GIFs enable us to be humorous, passing winking acknowledgements of cultural references, and convey just the right amount of melodrama. In 2012 GIF was selected by the Oxford English Dictionary for word of the year. Consider that the following year it was “selfie,” then “vape” in 2013 and 2014, respectively. If the radar of English language arbiters is any indicator of our contemporaneity, this particular forum illustrates how in those three years the English-speaking world embraced digital production and expression, developed an internalized PR mechanism and ways to auspiciously enjoy our vices. These words are symptomatic of a moment of hubris that motivated a deregulation of expression, access and consumption. In 2015 the word of the year was this emoji, 😂 and then the words of the year in 2016 and 2017 were “post-truth” and “youthquake”. From 2012 to 2017, the Oxford Dictionary seems to have traced a telling trajectory from a few short years of atomized optimism for digital natives, followed by a year of nervous laughter, followed by the election of social and spiritual bankruptcy, and then some movement towards a more austere optimism propelled by social assembly and a reconsideration of what belonging to a network entails.

GIFs are celebrated for their compatibility across platforms, which allows the format to flourish across low- and high-brow art communities, and it is celebrated for that slippage. Its portability and accessibility means that you can easily produce and access experimental or challenging compositions, as explored in the work of Lorna Mills and Jeremy Bailey, whose lurid, kitschy and transgressive iconography is embraced both by netizens and the art world. The artistic validation for the majority of GIF artists rarely comes through the art world, though. Sumit Sijher, a quantum engineering researcher for a software solutions company based in Waterloo, Ontario, made GIFs employing mathematical algorithms to create coded pattern animations and posted them on his Tumblr, “intothecontinuum”.  This led to his GIF Dust Loops (2016) becoming the  centrepiece of the 2016 FILE Electronic International Language Festival in Sao Paulo. The image file format  initially presents as a utilitarian medium where meritocracy can play out—if your GIFs are formally challenging or technically virtuoustic, it doesn’t matter if you play into the social economy of contemporary art; you will not be excluded from the possibility of being a virtual exhibition like FILE, Wrong Biennial, or GIF FEST 3000.

This kind of flexibility, ease of transmission, and lack of identity contributes to a notion of classlessness that fuels a politicized reading of it, but it doesn’t inherently possess the radical quality that falls under Hito Steyerl’s idea of the “poor image.”¹ According to Steyerl, the poor image is the “lumpen proletariat in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution.” The poor image, in its inherently low quality, holds transgressive and possibly revolutionary potential. Poor images “show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable.” This may apply to the display quality of pirated films (informed by whom and where they screen), and the media that might circulate between civil unrest groups and protest or occupy movements, but I’m not sure the GIF can follow through with such radical sentiments because of a general aspiration to transcend its outsider identity.

In a brief article on artnet, “Will Galleries and Museums Ever Embrace Animated GIF Art?” American artist Andrew Benson remarked, “The lowbrow quality of animated GIFs opens up the opportunity to do something off-the-cuff and experimental.”² Benson also admitted that GIFs were in the “underwear drawer” of his repertoire and only began taking it seriously once he realized there was an audience for it. The article describes artistic camps emerging between the critical evaluation of how the file format can be formally pushed and its potential as envelope-pushing medium. In the article, Lorna Mills weighs in on this distinction as well, saying that overly-polished or technically rigorous GIFs are “boring”. The boring GIFs she might be referring to are perhaps the ones that dismiss the rougher aesthetic of early Internet Art and deploy it more as a platform to exhibit animation techniques, algorithmic coding, and special effects software. This dichotomy of clean “boring” GIFs compared against Mills’ blunt, pornographic collaging is consistent with the notion of rich vs. poor images based on the criteria of resolution—however, for many of these artists, the notion of rich vs. poor is indeed an aesthetic determination, not a circumstance of class.

Many artists experimenting with GIFs gain recognition through a conglomeration of Internet audiences. Once these parties are identified, they become like self-actualizing focus groups for marketing. The aesthetic of the poor image plays into the optimism and freedom of visual discharge, while the aesthetic of the rich image often leads to careers as motion designers and art directors, such as minimals GIFs on the website of Cal Dean (who also curated into FILE in 2015) and Kidmograph, who started out with a GIF blog and currently works on special effects in music videos for Kendrick Lamar, The Strokes and Bruno Mars.

The majority of the art history of GIFs exists on networked Internet communities with an image-sharing base, such as Tumblr or Instagram, both reliable launch pads for aspiring creative entrepreneurs. “Boring”, in this sense, might imply that they are flashy, but ultimately vacuous or enterprising. Whether the resolution is high or low, they often accomplish the similar ends: the validation of their art through the accumulation of surplus value.

GIF art might be poor images at some point in their art history, but they seem to frequently transcend their class situation by way of resolution, or reach less universal audiences, because they broker actual transactions IRL. In 2011 Lauren Cornell, then Executive Director of Rhizome, was at The Armory Show, screening and selling animated GIFs and unique websites. In an interview with Hyperallergic, Cornell shows a Sara Ludy animated GIF on a 27” iMac and explains to the journalist that the collector is purchasing a unique animated GIF file on a USB stick with a certificate. After that, the file would be taken offline.

In Neomaterialism, Joshua Simon remarks that The Armory Show is the art fair that has branded itself as selling “New Art by Living Artists”, a simple statement that asserts the nowness of the art, perhaps a kind of art that has no eye towards the future or the past.³ The paradigm that we have entered wherein a GIF can be granted the same commodity potential and value as that of any other conventional plastic art is a really, really far cry from the poor image, but still retains the aesthetic. The idea of selling a GIF is a cause for celebration, especially because digital artists have a right to make a living, and also because the future of GIFs as a “serious” or (in the sense of the market) a legitimate art commodity, relies on all the mechanisms—art criticism, institutional presence, provenance—that would also in turn make it a saleable medium. The double life of GIFs is that the excitement at the prospect of them going offline dramatically undermines the sense of freedom that buttresses much of the critical considerations and potentiality that make the format excitable to artists.

This positions the GIF artist as a figure who oscillates between standing at the gates fussing with locks and throwing rocks at the institution that rebukes them. When Ben Eastham was commissioned by Rhizome to review the Wrong Biennial in 2015, he wrote, “In its simultaneous acknowledgement and denial of complicity in a commercial system, Neutrality (2015) [an artwork by Georges Jacotey] is an example of a wider conflict in the biennial between defiant adherence to a loosely politicized notion of digital art’s authenticity, and a craving for further art-historical legitimacy.”⁴ In the same review, he realized how reliant he was on the physical encounter of art to inform his responses: “A first attempt to engage with the digital art biennial, in which I spent several hours schlepping round the various “virtual pavilions,” was frustrating precisely because the expectation of a comparably immersive experience was misguided.”⁵

Eastham’s disintegration of art and life described here is so shockingly banal: “Beyond the edges of my laptop remained visible a cup of cooling tea, an accusatory stack of unread books, and several cheap reproductions of canonical works of art; the space remained resolutely untransformed.” He resigned himself to checking the homepage and wading through the artworks as one would check their Twitter while waiting for coffee or public transit. Eastham’s account of a digital art experience is rooted in the presumption that digital art would reproduce the requisite immersion with which brick-and-mortar gallery would supply a critic. Ultimately, Eastham could not have a sustained engagement with Wrong Biennial because his experiences of art privileged that which is facilitated by actual pavilions. This literary nonfiction writer’s encounter with a virtual exhibition of digital art details how digital art is continually in contention with the expectations of critics like Eastham when it attempts to reproduce the mechanisms of the world it apparently rebukes and claims freedom from.. GIFs shouldn’t necessarily aspire to be looked at with a legitimizing gaze (often a classist or monetizing gaze).

GIFs also possess the capacity to engender a mode of commiseration through the solidarity of having experienced the same cultural moment. Hence, the darkly comedic selection of an acronym for a compressed file format—“GIF”—as a “word of the year” by an authority on the English language. Something, something about a picture being a thousand words, but when we outsource the labour of linguistic expression, of composition and explanation, to images, we are relying on two- to three-second excerpts of Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and Rick and Morty to demonstrate our emotional life.(See again, 2015 word of the year: “ 😂“ ). These idioms are bound up in efficiency for affect. We begin to speak by collaging cultural memory rather than struggling to parse awkward poetics. In an interview between Martine Syms and Amy Kazymerchyk, Syms describes this phenomenon as pervasive among a media-savvy generation and is interested in “how the forms of speech and movement that were captured in television sitcoms are now being replicated in self-presentations online.” She goes on to say, “Social media spaces and the way that people talk about their lives in them feel very sitcom-y to me.”

AK: Are you saying that what we’re seeing in YouTube videos, gifs, Vines and memes, is the product of a generation that grew up with television sitcoms in the ’80s and ’90s and inherited the expressions and structures of speaking, acting and moving from this media and are emulating them in their own lives and representations of life?

MS: Yeah, and the way that they narrativize their lives – their way of understanding collective consciousness or history.⁶

Steyerl suggests that the poor image exacerbates a dwindling attention economy, “On one hand, it operates against the fetish value of high resolution. On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings.” The value of brevity is only surpassed by pithiness in a neoliberal productivity rubric: Don’t waste time. Get to the point. Elevator pitch your mood. A poetics of brevity or brief poetics can be reclaimed, though. Some of my readings of Lydia Davis’ shortest of short stories, for example, Idea for a Short Documentary Film:

Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging

Or Spring Spleen

I am happy the leaves are growing large so quickly. Soon they will hide the neighbour

and her screaming child.

Or, Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room

Your housekeeper has been Shelly.⁷

These stories mimic the duration of GIFs (In some literary circles, I may have just blasphemed), but their brevity samples humanity, rather than reducing or flattening it. As the relationship between books and their film adaptations go, whether the latter does its source any favours is always debatable, but perhaps the GIF can offer a moving image counterpart to microfiction. The title bleeds into the story and culls other things into the frame. For me, Davis’ strong sips of life present a kind of supradigital model or precedent for a poetics that GIFs can encompass through the demonstration of familiar objects. Within the frame of the GIF, this possibility for a brief poetics resides in a gesture, or demonstration—not of the technology, but but perhaps illustrative of the life of an object and the world that object inhabits.

The light anthropomorphism of Construction Sieve, Cutting Pliers and Painter’s Knife by Sylvain Sailly show the tools at work, given as capsules of repetitive labour. Sailly shows a pair of pliers take a bite, severing a green filament. Construction Sieve wavers like a hockey goalie in front of a net to catch incoming gravel. In this case, the net is the goalie. The action also conveys the tool’s personality that called to mind how perfectly matched the character of Lumière is with the objecthood he inhabits, the elegant and commanding candelabra in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991).

I zoom out incrementally to revealing a tiled effect of the image that multiplies the tool in the window of my browser. This manifests the effect of a small arsenal of the tituar tool, suspended against a solid grey background. Illustrative of a Fordist labour condition—a concentration of a specialized task—the simple, quiet and quotidian gesture of the tool, like Davis’ stories, always implies more as you widen the frame. The work of Uno Moralez regards the frame of the GIF as a panel from a comic or still. His GIFs, filed under “loops” on his website, draw on the iconography of Japanese horror, illuminati, Jodorowsky, and misogynoir. Characters are established in a single composition. Usually, one component of the entire composition is in motion, a flicker that gives the image breath. Akin to Sailly’s tools, one of his GIFs demonstrates the opening of a switchblade against a twinkling night sky. This gesture is far less about the character of the object than how this drawing of a weapon is framed in a cinematic language, suggestive of conflict, vengeance, retribution, morality, however isolated from an overt plot. Uno Moralez doesn’t tell stories; he merely triggers narrative in collective consciousness. Given this fragment of requisite switchblade-carrying, characters are conjured—the gesture performs the reveal akin to that of a decompressed file.

Compressing and decompressing are metaphors that speak to the social life of an object or file. For INDEX, AVENUE, SKYLIGHT (2018), Nicolas Sassoon exhibited three animations that spatially reimagine three former artist-run spaces and music venues that operated in Vancouver between 2014 to 2016. On his website, the entire image is divided into eight large GIF panels that offer a panoramic experience via the browser. In a gallery, this work is shown as a video across two 4K monitors. The neatly placed objects and furniture rendered in the clean lines illustrating the objects are a version of the space that the artist presents from his memory—a snapshot sprinkled with a magical interventions to fill in the blanks—sea creatures pouring out of the plumbing and broom closets with dustpan in tentacle, a clock sprinting out the door of the venue.

They all share the iconography of a DIY space—stacked plywood, power bars, a projector on a ladder, a makeshift bar, and the added visual pun of “time running out”. The figure might allude to imminent daylight, when we turn back into pumpkins, baristas and debt-ridden graduate students; but on a larger timescale, that fantastical element suggests an expiration date on cultural spaces due to the effects of private real estate development in the city. The depiction of these former art spaces mark erasure, shifting urban fabric—a lot of movement is captured even though there are no human figures. The movement Sassoon captures is sublimated from sources within and external to what is seen in the frame. Experiencing these works both in a physical gallery and on Sassoon’s website appeals to contrasting sensibilities. Viewing it on two 4K monitors within a low-lit installation seemed to be the optimal viewing experience, or a maximized one.

Looking at it again as a GIF for the purposes of this essay was a compressed version of that first encounter with the work. In my second encounter, I felt far more at ease to contemplate the details that beckoned the attention I reserve for navigating an interior within a video game. Though I was looking at the same image as in the gallery, noticing that the moving image on my screen was stitched together from eight GIFs prompted formal connections to  large-scale paintings that are installed in sections, as well as greatly detailed works by Bosch and Matisse’s interiors. The dual life of this work is possible because of the GIF, and its livelihood as an artwork is furthered in its possible and multiple viewing contexts in both states of compressed and decompressed. But the deployment of the format itself is the furthest thing from what compels me to spend time with it, subverting the tendency for GIFs to pander to a fleeting attention span or single-serving emotion.

Digital file formats occupy the exceptional position of influencing tensions and opening pathways between digital and non-digital landscapes. Whenever GIFs occupy a place beyond the Net, it is the fact of the migration that captivates audiences in the form of novel newsbites. Their inclusion in physical exhibition and sales of unique GIF files at art fairs still resonates as novel, as is the  means to speculate on their validity as art through the mechanisms of a cultural economy; but rarely does this coverage discuss their content at great length. If we are to consider GIFs outside the scope of market validation, then the gaze must be informed by a socialized (rather than canonical) appreciation of art across mediums and class, and foster a visual lexicon that doesn’t rely on the fact of its medium to authenticate itself—like painting about painting, photography about photography—but acknowledges its form and extends its formal limitations and social possibilities to a burgeoning discourse of art and life.

STEFFANIE LING is a producer of criticism, pamphlets, stories, essays, exhibitions, reviews, bluntness, anecdotes, shout outs, wrestling storylines, proposals, applications, jokes, readings, minimal poems, poems, dinner, compliments, and diatribes. She is a curator at VIVO Media Arts Centre and her criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, Hong Kong Review of Books, Flash Art, San Francisco Art Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail among others. Her books are NASCAR (Blank Cheque, 2016) and CUTS OF THIN MEAT (Spare Room, 2015).

1. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” published in e-flux journal, Issue #10, November 2009. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.
2. Paddy Johnson, “Will Galleries and Museums Ever Embrace Animated GIF Art?” artnet (April 11, 2014).
3. Joshua Simon, Neomaterialism. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013).
4. Ben Eastham, “Review: The Wrong Biennial.” Rhizome (December 1, 2015) http://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/dec/01/the-wrong-biennale-review/.
5. Ibid.
6. Martine Syms interviewed by Amy Kazymerchyk, “Borrowed Lady: Martine Syms in Conversation with Amy Kazymerchyk.” C Magazine, Issue 132: Force (Winter 2017), http://cmagazine.com/issues/132/borrowed-lady-martine-syms-in-conversation-with-amy-kazymerchyk.
7. All stories can be found in The Collected Short Stories of Lydia Davis (London: Picador, 2009).

This article is published in issue 35.2 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue