Media Arts Watch Lab - www.arts-numeriques.info - laboratoire de veille Arts Numériques - twitter @arts_numeriques - @processing_org - @DigitalArt_be - by @jacquesurbanska @_Transcultures
For the past decade, along with fellow former members of the late hacker-net artist collective Free Art & Technology (FAT) Lab, American artist Evan Roth has been “dedicated to enriching the public domain one mutha-fuckin LOL at a time,” as the collective writes in their mission statement. Roth’s net art stunts have includedamassing a GIF army to Occupy the Internet; hacking his internet cache to create digital “self-portraits;” fooling the Google algorithm into making his name the number one search result for “bad ass mother fucker,” and creating a browser plug-in that erases Justin Bieber from the internet.
But in recent years, especially in the wake of the NSA spying scandal, Roth has found himself disillusioned with the “monetization, commercialization, and centralization of the internet,” as he tells Hyperallergic....
recto/verso: Being one of the pioneers of net art, what is your definition of it? How do you distinguish someone who makes art online from someone doing things online? I think that Capture follows this path of reflection exactly…
Gregory Chatonsky: It would be difficult to summarize all the history of netart. It has given rise to many debates and multiple strategies. What I have noticed is that very quickly, some players in the netart wanted to invent its History and, at the same time, historicize themselves. The almost immediate passage between Contemporary and History seems to be a symptom of our time: we know that all is going to be lost very quickly, that immediate obsolescence is also going to affect our devices and that we need to develop discourses to follow in another temporality. Thus the notion of pioneering, of frequent use, is rooted in the imagination of the American West, of the Wild West in Silicon Valley. When the classic net.art declare that the netart died, there is, beyond a false forward thinking, a way of appropriating a domain: because if it is dead, we are simultaneously the first and last. The act of certifying death is also a declaration of birth. I think it’s time to make a critical juncture and analyze from a distance this historicizing procedure as an artistic capture strategy. Unfortunately some art historians have taken this to its first degree. As for the distinction between an art that would address the network as a medium and a different art, which would consider it in a strictly instrumental way, I see it there an avatar of Greenbergian modernity where the sovereignty of the artwork is identified with the process of empowering the medium. What interests me here is how the “net art” reactivated past discussions and became a bearer for nearly 20 years of a certain modernist posture that saw the development of coding, glitch, GIF, etc. Web for web, art for art, money for money, these self-references circulate on each other...
I'm pleased to present an interview with Lorna Mills, who has been working with the GIF format since 2005. Lorna uses different ways to create her animated GIFs, a well known one is from the huge research she makes on the Internet about viral videos, images and even found GIFs, then she manipulates it to create her animated collages to show to the viewer her own story, her own world. I must say Lorna's work is great and funny, I love to see at her work and see how all those situations are put together. But it is not always funny Lorna works can be offensive, profane, sexy, violent, bizarre.. You will find a great variety of content on her pieces, as she says; men and women wanking with rubber dolphins, masturbating kangaroos, animals humping inanimate objects... more into the post!
Lorna Mills has actively exhibited her work in both solo and group exhibitions since the early 1990's. A founding member of the Red Head Gallery, her practice has included obsessive Cibachrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film, and recently, obsessive digital video animations incorporated into restrained installation work. ...
George Redhawk tells us how he hijacked morphing software to create his hallucinatory GIFs
A Tribute to Adam Martinakis by GameL +Adam Martinakis source: 3DVF.com/GameL. GIF animation by George RedHawk.
Before becoming an unlikely viral GIF art sensation, George Redhawk worked in various areas of medicine, instructing on subjects such as x-ray technology and, rather surprisingly, phlebotomy.
As he tells The Creators Project, he had a fairly productive life doing that. Then, suddenly, Redhawk lost his sight, destroying his career and life in the process. And even though he continued to teach for four years, Redhawk says he “lost everything”...
A tattooed underwear model is slowly ripped apart from the inside in Ínsula, a collaborative GIF set between Chilean artist Jon Jacobsen and Colombian fashion artist Daniel Ramos Obregón.
Jacobsen tells The Creators Project that Ramos Obregón's photos evoke, "the transformation of one body affected by it’s inner projections," a.k.a. the conflicting avatars that occupy our social media-driven lives. Jacobsen then illustrated the photos and turned them into GIFs, a medium he calls, "a contemporary way of communicating with people, getting close to the exchange of intimacy and the emotional aspects to written words through technologies.”...
Tumblr has figured out a way to make us all stare at GIFs for even longer. It's created a new area of its site called Tumblr TV, which displays endless streams of GIFs that you tune out to. The site shows nearly full-screen GIFs, which loops a few times before moving on. You can set it up to play GIFs based on a hashtag or a specific blog, but the best thing to do is search for something trippy, sit back, and enjoy.
A smartphone app reveals haunting messages hidden in Okkult Motion Pictures' GIF art.
Open PhonoPaper and scan this GIF to hear a hidden message. GIFs courtesy the artist You can now use your smartphone to discover messages hidden within custom-designed "talking" GIFs, thanks to Italian GIF artists Okkult Motion Pictures.
Using Alexander Zolotov’s PhonoPaper app, Okkult makes augmented reality artworks that look and sound like they were taken straight out of a horror movie in space.....
Nicolas Sassoon, currently an artist in residence at the digital art nonprofit Opening Times, turns GIFs into sculptures, and architecture into GIFs.
“Why GIFs?," Opening Times recently asked artist Nicolas Sassoon. Sassoon has been on a three-month virtual residency with the London-based digital media art nonprofit, and has spent the bulk of it working on massive GIFs that span the width of a browser and actually require scrolling. His latest work, Studio Visit, depicts a studio space complete with wall panels, a brick fireplace, and multiple LCD screens. ...
These may be the most unexpectedly gorgeous and disturbing examples of experimental GIF art I've ever seen. Follow the multimedia artist behind them: @kyttenjanae on Twitter and Instagram. Anyone who says animated GIFs aren't a form of fine art should light up a fattie and spend some time on kyttenjanae.tumblr.com, then STFU.
Animated GIFs can be created by anyone and are about anything. The animated GIF is ubiquitous and democratic. Online, it's proliferation coincides with the developing ways we use the Internet. As a unique and accessible moving image filetype, animated GIF functions on the logic of openness and distributed networks in a time of increasing data surveillance and restrictions to access by governing bodies and corporate capitalization of data-spaces.
GIF Free For All is an online exhibition of animated GIFs created by 19 international artists. By acknowledging the range of contemporary and popular culture uses, this exhibition seeks to expand the conversation surrounding animated GIFs within Art contexts. By occupying server spaces worldwide, by circulating endlessly, by evolving and shifting over time, by looping and tiling in expanding frames and windows, the animated GIF is FREE FOR ALL.
Invited artists were be asked to contribute at least one animated GIF for the exhibition and to work within a few filesize constraints. This GIF exhibition was compiled and launched in conjunction with Computer Art Congress 4 - CAC4 Rio de Janeiro. GIF Free For All will be exhibited as part of the gallery exhibition at CAC4. GIF Free For All was proposed, organized, and presented by A. Bill Miller. It was initially launch at the congress, and then released publicly. The show was also supported by the University of Wisconsin Whitewater and TRANSFER Gallery in Brooklyn, NYC.
Let's face it, after about 2009 GIF production accelerated at such a rate that any attempt to identify key artists would not only be futile, but create a post so long no one would read it. As such, for this section I've decided to focus solely on Tumblr, whose role is significant enough in the development and dissemination of GIF art to earn a post of its own.
What does the history of GIF art look like? This is a tricky question to answer because while there has been no shortage of animated GIF exhibitions, there is a dearth of documentation. Bond Street, a Brooklyn-based gallery that hosted Laurel Ptak's exhibition “Graphics Interchange Format" in August 2008, no longer exists and neither does its website.
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“Save for Web," a GIF exhibition that opened in August 2009 at Xpace Cultural Centre in Toronto has its own 1.0 website at Angel Fire, but no install shots or GIF slideshows. The same is true of the non-profit digital arts organization Rhizome, which heavily promoted its 2006 exhibition, “The Animated GIF Show," on MySpace, and hosted the show in San Francisco.
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This poses a problem because it means it's much more difficult to piece together a history of how GIFs have been used in an art context. That history isn't going to be told in one article, but given the pervasive lack of documentation, an overview is essential before key moments are completely forgotten.
How one humble file type ruled the internet for decades.
November 5, 1999, was Burn All GIFs Day. Had you visited its homepage that Friday, you would have seen the movement's game plan laid out as plainly as its name: "On Burn All GIFs Day, all GIF users will gather at Unisys and burn all their GIF files." This, alongside a selection of pointedly anti-GIF imagery—all proudly PNG files.
Despite the obvious joke of setting files on fire, acknowledged with a winking plea to "extinguish all GIFs before leaving the vicinity," the anger was real and the mission was earnest: to free the web from the scourge of the GIF once and for all.
Already more than a decade old and with roots reaching back half a decade before the World Wide Web itself, the GIF was showing its age. It offered support for a paltry 256 colors. Its animation capabilities were easily rivaled by a flipbook. It was markedly inferior to virtually every file format that had followed it.
On top of that, there were the threats of litigation from parent companies and patent-holders which had been looming over GIF users for five long years before the fiery call to action. By Burn All GIFs Day, the GIF was wobbling on the precipice of destruction. Those who knew enough to care deeply about file formats and the future of the web were marching on the gates, armed with PNGs of torches and pitchforks.
And yet, somehow, here we are. Seventeen years later, the GIF not only isn't dead. It rules the web.
Ces images animées très courtes sont désormais un moyen d’expression à part entière sur les réseaux sociaux. Mais ce format d’image est aussi utilisé par des créateurs comme moyen d'expression de leur art. Une exposition dans les rues de Paris démarre ce samedi. ...
Nicolas Sassoon est un artiste français basé à Vancouver au Canada. Son travail emploie l’animation et le dessin informatique comme éléments générateurs de visions fantastiques explorant le paysage, l’architecture et l’univers domestique. Bien que la majorité de son travail soit publié sur Internet via le GIF animé et d’autres formats web, Nicolas Sassoon matérialise sa pratique digitale en installations in-situ, sculptures, impressions et textiles, collaborant régulièrement avec d’autres artistes, couturiers et producteurs d’évènements musicaux. Son travail s’intéresse particulièrement aux dimensions contemplatives et projectives de l’univers digital ; comment le numérique peut agir sur notre espace quotidien.
Nicolas Sassoon est un membre fondateur du collectif WALLPAPERS, et un membre du collectif Computers Club. Nicolas a exposé au New Museum (USA), Eyebeam (USA), 319 Scholes (USA), May Gallery & Residency (USA), Vancouver Art Gallery (CANADA), Plug In ICA (CANADA), Contemporary Art Gallery (CANADA), Charles H.Scott Gallery (CANADA), Western Front (CANADA), PRETEEN Gallery (MEXIQUE), the Centre d’Art Bastille (FRANCE), Arti et Amicitiae (PAYS-BAS), MU Eindhoven (PAYS-BAS) , Victoria & Albert Museum (ANGLETERRE), Today Art Museum (CHINE), la Berlin Fashion Week (ALLEMAGNE) et la New-York Fashion Week (USA).
Future of World Wide Web: Interactive Multimedia Interconnectedness. Curated by Haydiroket - HYPERMEDIA DREAMS is part of The Wrong (again) - New Digital Art Biennale.
Mert Keskin aka Haydiroket is an Istanbul resident, well known around the world with a very impressive work in this medium.His works presented on theMuseum of the Moving Image and Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.He has participated in many exhibitions in Canada, the UK, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Asia and the US and has worked with numerous companies in the entertainment business and his is also a one of Tumblr’s resident GIF editors.
There are plenty of GIF-filled rabbit holes into which a person can wander and never return. Tumblr is perhaps the most daunting maze of all, providing us with enough looping images of a twerking Niki Minaj to co-opt an entire workday. But while the GIFs you find on Tumblr, Giphy and Buzzfeed are great, they’ve got nothing on the procedural beauty of Wikipedia GIFs.
Draw a triangle with the co-ordinates hacktivism, interactive art and gif mashups, and the zone created is where Evan Roth calls home. Having recently coloured Dublin’s streets with the Science Gallery’s Propulsion Paintings workshop, Roth returns for a collaborative show with found material artist Constant Dullaart for GLITCH. ...
The next editions of Transnumeriques Awards will take place @ Lille in Octobre, a Digital Art Taipei Taipei (Taiwan) early November and the end of novembre @ Transnumériques@Mons2015. ...
«GIF IT ! est la première édition d’une série d’expositions nomades autour du GIF art. Le concept : sortir les GIFS des écrans et les élever au rang d’œuvres d’art. Les animations se déclenchent lors d’un déplacement autour d'elles via une illusion d’optique. »
It can be hard to take your eyes off a good GIF. Turns out, it can also be tough to take your eyes off a terrifying one.
In Oswra, a collection of GIFs by self-taught animator Hayden Zezula, we witness baby parts rearranged into all sorts of endlessly-looping abominations. A plaster-white baby head sits atop a churning cone of arms and hands. A dense cluster of legs marches nowhere at all, like a sea anemone with tiny feet instead of tentacles.
In the final chapter of her history of GIF art, Paddy Johnson chronicles the heyday of Google+ and the explosion of brick-and-mortar GIF art exhibitions.
Much has changed in the world of animated GIF makers over the past few years. Social networking sites have become a lot more accommodating to larger GIF file sizes. Limited run online exhibitions have grown in popularity, as have brick and mortar events. As with the Tumblr history outlined in the previous chapter, there's too much activity to document all of it. In this last section, I will outline some of the more seminal sites and exhibitions from between 2011 and 2014, as well as some very recent developments.
From 2006 to 2010, artists posted animated GIF art en masse to collaborative blog platforms.
Welcome to part two of this brief journey through the rich history of one of the newest and most popular art forms, the animated GIF. To read the first part, "The Early Years: 1997–2008," click here.
GROUP BLOGS, SURF CLUBS, AND THE BEGINNING OF SOCIAL NETWORKING
The period from 2006 to 2010 was marked by the rise of self-started social networks. Artists were sharing GIFs on Myspace before many migrated to their own collaboratively run blogs. These sites hosted an enormous number of found and self-made GIFs, and tended to be male-dominated. A few highlights from the golden era of GIF art blogs below.
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