About | gifcritique

Long-term curatorial and research project GIF: Visual Practice as Critique is dedicated to systematization, preservation, exhibiting and presentation of animated GIFs related to spatial issues and architecture in the broadest sense. It aims to position animated GIF within the context of new media art and to revalue its position in certain stages of curatorial process, such as documentation and presentation of events and museum collections of architectural models. As such, the project connects cultural heritage to new media, as well as artists, activists, associations, collectives, researchers and all those who are using this free and easy-to-make format.

Recognising animated GIF as marginal blitz in art history, the project is realised since 2014 though online collection and series of exhibitions, workshops, screenings, theoretic writings and spoken word programmes, in cooperation with both regional and international institutions. Though its shortness, animated GIF expands the fields of visual art, museology and architecture, intersecting them with new media and communication technologies. It has capacity to critically capture changing character of architecture in the social, political and economic transitions and for that reason the project aims to preserve the contexts of GIFs’ origins and, therefore, their meanings.

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(Art) historical development of animated GIF

Animated GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) was created in the late 1980s for purpose of transferring and storing digital animated logos within cyberspace. Although considered now to be a low quality format, at the time of its creation, this “eight-bit file format introduced the amazing spectacle of 256 colour images to be won over the thin lines of dial-up connections” (Fuller, 2012). It is an upgrade of GIF format from 1977 that could transfer a single picture only, but nevertheless represented a miniature technical revolution. Static GIF image was invented “to provide a graphic format that can support colour images, as result of addressing the shortcomings of the previous Run-Length Encoding (RLE), the first graphics compression algorithm, capable of only supporting black and white” (Chiarini, 2015: 130).

The type of GIF that could withstand multiple images, and is known today as animated GIF, was transferring files since the beginning without impoverishing their quality. It is based on LZW (Lempel – Ziv – Welch) algorithm whose main characteristic is lossless compression. This means that “if you compress an image with such a technique and expand the file again, the image

outcome is in every detail and bit identical to the original, non-compressed image” (Miano, 1999: 12, quoted in Schiet, 2012: 65). From today's perspective it is seen as a poor image because it is not suitable for transferring high definition digital photographs, significantly reducing their resolution and colour spectre. However, contemporary technologies overcame this issue and animated GIF started to embody animations of higher image quality.

Animated GIF is no longer used for file transfer, which was its initial purpose, but it remains extremely popular digital media in a wide context of contemporary visual culture. When invented, “the animated GIF allowed pixels to dance” (Fuller, 2012), which inspired a number of net-artists. Today, it represents a micro-narrative form, similar to micro-blogging, in the proliferation of post- contexts that are describing contemporaneity. It is perceived as decontextualised image recycling and “an idiomatic language rooted in a communal experience not of labour or action but spectatorship and postproduction” (Bianconi, 2012). Wide social use of animated GIF in relation to entertainment influenced overseeing its practical and poetic sides. As a democratic, open and free medium that can have a strong analytical and critical note, animated GIF is format “to be distributed. The ability for one image to appear in countless contexts made it the success that it is” (Lialina, 2005).

This twofold decontextualisation makes it a signifier of plural meanings. On one side, animated GIF has ability to decontextualise a clip of film, video or television material, becoming, as Rourke classified it, a frame-capture GIF or art GIF. According to Alessandra Chiarini, isolated from its original context and manipulated potentially indefinitely, the capture GIF frame is therefore a “poor image,” pervaded, however, by complex and numerous tensions, polarized between the loss of “original” and “official” authorship and the multiple ownership created through interactivity of users. (2015: 151)

On the other hand, animated GIF not only decontextualises material in order to make its own content, but it also has the ability to appear in a number of new contexts. Having difficulties to contain permanent, original context, animated GIF is classified as a “poor image” that talks about “its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation” (Steyerl, 2011). As such, it is becoming more frequent in PR practices of museums and research centres, art criticism published in electronic journals, in thematic and art exhibitions.

Position of an animated GIF within curatorial practices

Animated GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) is today widely popular type of visual communication, but its capacities have not been used to their full extent. It is mainly trivialised, due to its caricature-like effects, and used for entertainment, while similar media – time lapse photography – has a recognised role in art and processes of documentation, especially in presentation of urban development, such as in Zachary Formwalt’s Three Exchanges. Nevertheless, some cultural institutions have recognised its values. At the beginning of 2014, Tate Britain launched an open call for 1840s GIF Party, which is perhaps the closest animated GIF came to history of art, being in other ways part of the art world through auctions and galleries. Apart from that, GIF got its part within museums as a segment of programmes, such as in case of Downcast Eyes at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago that begun with an one-night GIF event.

New York Storefront for Art and Architecture extensively uses animated GIFs in PR practice, but also as a form of documentation of events, organising from time to time GIF themed parties.

Richard Balzer’s museum of optical toys and proto-film devices contains not only information about the collected items, as well as detailed drawings and diagrams from the XIX Century that explain their functioning, but also animated GIFs that demonstrate it. In the context of educational programs, Rhizome.org, an affiliate of the New Museum which commissioned and exhibited several projects related to animated GIFs, presented The Reanimator Lab, “a community-sourced, hand-drawn animated GIF factory where you can make collaborative animations with your friends.” Within this workshop/ platform, the existing GIFs were decompressed, each frame was drawn by another participant, and then all the drawings were digitized and composed into a new animated GIF. Paddy Johnson, reflecting on inclusion of GIFs in museums and galleries strictly through the code of the market, emphasises, in “a long history of GIF sales,” the one when Rhizome.org “sold a selection of animated GIFs at the Armory Art Show” in 2011.

Collections of animated GIFs are usually found on portals where artists publish them, but there are also collections where GIFs are used to communicate activism and critique of society. As they are located on the screen in front of us, “GIFs are simultaneously ‘in your face’ and in your mind” (McKay, 2009). To what extent is an animated GIF a medium noteworthy of art theoreticians’ attention, indicates text by Clive Thompson who points out that “the animated GIF lets us stop and ponder a single moment in the stream, to resee something that otherwise would zip by unnoticed” (2013). As a result, “we’ve started watching with scholarly scrutiny [. . .] In a sense, the animated GIF illustrates what sharp viewers we’re becoming” (op. cit.). Despite the fact that he sees an animated GIF as a clip of several frames from video, naming as the most representative ones those that show popular culture, politicians, pets, animated characters and meme, Thompson analyses the example of critical GIF of Elspeth Reeve, who used this medium to deconstruct movements in gymnastics and facial expressions of politicians. Through her activity, GIF gained the characteristics of forensic science.

Thus, an animated GIF is a means for video analysis, motion analysis and analysis of perception, in short, a means of anatomy and improvement of critical observation of moving images. When present in museums and galleries, GIF opens a new way of perceiving visual art because, unlike video, it does not have a predetermined time length. The attention of the viewer is thus also not a prerequisite. At the same time, GIF does not cease to exist elsewhere.

Concept and research:

Sonja Jankov