![]() ![]() A playground of correspondences that at first reflected language and the wider world now looks increasingly inward. GIFs can be broken into their constituent frames, compressed and corrupted on purpose and made to act as archives for viral events travelling the web. ![]() Sites like dump.fm, 4chan and ytmnd revel in the GIF’s ability to quickly correspond to the world. GIFs inhabit the space between convenience and abundance, where an apparent breakdown in communication can stimulate new modes of expressing non-sensuous similarities in the internet world. Thus the era of personal web pages saturated with looping animations of spinning hamsters was born.īrought on – ironically – by their obsolescence the GIF has become the medium of choice for web artists, propagating their particular net-aesthetic through this free, open and kitschy medium. In the mid 90s avid web hackers managed to crack the code of GIFs and use this ‘partial loading’ mechanism to encode animations within a single GIF file. In the days of poor bandwidth and dial-up connections this meant that at least part of a GIF image would appear before the user’s connection broke, or – more significantly – the user could see enough of the image for it to make sense. Their early popularity was based, in part, on their ability to load in time with a web-page. The GIF – standing for Graphical Interchange Format – has been around since 1987. “So speed, the swiftness in reading or writing which can scarcely be separated from this process, would then become… the effort or gift of letting the mind participate in that measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the stream of things only in order to become immediately engulfed again.” ![]() To put it in simpler terms… Where once we read the world, the stars or the entrails of a sacrificed animal, now we read the signs enabled and captured by written language.įrom Benjamin’s The Doctrine of the Similar: In a break from Saussurian linguistics, Benjamin decries the loss of this “mimetic faculty”, as it becomes further replaced by the “archive of non-sensuous correspondences” we know as writing. The faculty we all exhibit in childhood play, to impersonate and imitate people and things loses its determining power as language gradually takes over from our “non-sensuous” connection with reality. In two short essays – written in 1933 – Walter Benjamin argues that primitive language emerged in magical correspondence with the world. UPDATE: In 2017 I published an extended sequel to this paper: The Compulsions of the Similar: Animated GIFs and the TechnoCultural Body Published in issue 3.1 of Dandelion Journal, on ‘Brevity’ ![]()
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