The Affect of Animated GIF - Sally McKay
There were three main works and many people discussed in this article. One was Wissinger, with commentary on the affect in "attention economy". Her thoughts were particularly useful in acknowledgement of the GIF as a medium - a.k.a you don't need a long attention span to appreciate one. It raises another point, also, brought up by Morse, about the time and placement of a GIF image. If it is the only thing a gallery it will be viewed differently than on a computer screen alongside an infinite number more. Also, the "affect" of the GIF refers to emotional response, a response that Ngai states is not essential to survival (if we payed attention to everything thrown at us we would never get anything done). This also brings up to idea of the collective, how the human response is between mind and body is similar to the medium of the internet, with one device being viewed but invisibly connected to infinitely more devices (and this people). Manovich talks about the modern desire to externalize the mind and how technological pathways are dictated by the way we think. This is interesting to consider when thinking of the accessibility and nature of the GIF. My personal favorite work was "Conrad Rodney" by Mills.
Obsession with Compression - Brad Troemel
* GIF lends ability to communicate - respond on a forum - transcending the encoding and decoding time required of language.
*medium reflects our dwindling attention span. Because in most cases the work acknowledges that only 6 seconds or so may be spent on it, it caters to the contemporary viewer. This is much different than public sculpture or art that would be viewed endlessly, a piece in a home that would be seen and contemplated over and over, or even a movie which demands approximately 2 hours of undivided and attention and silence.
*can have true conceptual efficacy or only a novelty? Goes on to answer this.
*universal democratic and lasting; but without external support from a video player the GIF must behave as a photo while appearing to be an image
*I do have an issue with the entire last page of this essay. "The fault of the artistic GIF is not that it has rendered conceptually rich subjects to a point incapable of being critically expanded upon with conceptual depth, but that the format itself is a censorship of an amount of information necessary to create ideologically rich narratives transcendent of their own interface." They go on to argue that the best works of art transcend their own respective mediums, as art has left the obsession with medium specificity. For example, this could be why installation and mixed media has boomed so much in the last 60 years. I do see the necessity and inescapable trap for the GIF to acknowledge its own medium, and I think this may be a gross overstatement, but to me it seems that most digital/ new media art grapples with its form or medium extensively as well as addressing larger issues. Perhaps this is because art of a new media must go through an acknowledgement phase and once accepted (to a degree) can move out of that elementary phase? Considering the fact that most people, when walking through an art museum, look at a painting only in passing or an installation for a few seconds from one angle, I think we should hope that 5-10 seconds can relay some wisp of conceptual information.
http://the305.com/2012/11/29/art-basel-tumblr-presents-the-moving-the-still-gif-festival-december-5th-thru-december-8th/
GIF Exhibition at Art Basel Miami!
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