Curatorialist

I guess I just love me up some of the GIFs. Something I didn’t anticipate; becoming wistfully reminiscent of a technology from adulthood. I get my swoony love of 8-bit graphics and the sound of a Casio keyboard, but it’s harder to reconcile feeling all gushy over something that I used for work.

Perhaps it’s a representation of how far I/we’ve come since getting into Web design, back in the mid 90’s. Sort of like looking back on your first car, not nearly as advanced as your current car, but still a mark of distance, growth.

But moreso, I just like the creativity one experiences when leaning into a limited medium. All media is limited, in some respect. Certainly 8-bit graphics were. But even a canvas has an edge. Finding creativity within the constraints of technology are no different than within the constraints of clay. And the results no less effective. At least not to me.

Some of it, also, is knowing where something like this might show up: as a personal icon in a comment section, or simply sitting in the corner of a web page somewhere. Animated GIFs are like virtual graffiti tags – it’s as much where you place it as the mark itself. The technology and format of it is specific to the Web, and therefore it is as inextricably tied to it, as paint is to canvas or music was to vinyl (sigh).

Another, more difficult, part is the use of fewer frames. Just as :30 commercials have had to do much of what movies do in a fraction of the time, animated GIFs have had to do what :30 spots do, but with a fraction of the frames. With only a few frames within which to work, and because of the looping nature of the animated GIF, what the animator/artist is capturing is a moment, not a story. And moments often affect us even more deeply. When properly executed, a moment can cause more creativity in our own brains, as we create the context for it. Now, you CAN do that with film, but you can also do so much more. An animated GIF, on the other hand, reaches its limit there and so it forces the brain to think in terms of a repeated moment. It is the most miniscule step past photography, or drawing. Not enough to become a motion picture, or an animated story, but enough to create something more than a still. That little place is the sole propriety of the animated GIF.

And then still more is just the pure craftsmanship involved in some of it. The GIF has suffered from extraordinarily low expectations its whole life. It was sort of the troubled youth who ended up in jail, put away before ever reaching any kind of potential. And yet some keep pushing the envelope of it, making things that cause you to pause and marvel. Perhaps we should have just shown the kid a little love from the beginning and none of this might have happened. I blame society.