The Internet, it seems, has found its version of vinyl chic.
Just as the LP has enjoyed a second spin among retro-minded music fans,
animated GIFs — the choppy, crude snippets of video loops that hearken
back to dial-up modems — are enjoying an unlikely vogue as the digital
accessory of the moment.
Hypnotically repeating GIFs are popping up in art galleries in Berlin,
Miami and New York. In fashion advertising, they are suddenly as hot as
ironic brogues, popping up in online marketing campaigns
for brands like Burberry, Diesel and Jack Spade. Online, there are GIF
contests both highbrow and low, and “Best of” GIF roundups.
And social media sites like Tumblr have entire pages devoted to viral
GIFs plucked from the biggest news events of five minutes ago (political
speeches, awkward awards-show moments and other pop-cultural flotsam),
which instantly circulate as must-see memes.
“For people in their 20s, GIFs are a relic of their childhood, so it
makes sense they would come back as a fashion statement — just like ’70s
fashion came back in the ’90s, and the ’90s are coming back around
now,” said Jason Tanz, the executive editor of Wired.
It’s an unlikely renaissance for a geeky computer format that dates to
1987, the Internet’s Paleozoic era. That was when CompuServe, the
Internet service provider, developed the “graphics interchange format,”
as a way to bring a little color and movement to the Web.
Thanks to the animated GIF, first-generation Internet memes like the dancing baby (later appropriated by “Ally McBeal”) were spread.
The format has since grown up. Artists and photographers have used GIF
technology to push far beyond the lo-fi novelty of Web 1.0. Consider the
Wigglegram,
a craze on Tumblr, which creates a jaunty 3-D effect by looping
multiple images shot from slightly different perspectives, like an
old-fashioned stereopticon.
In addition to looking more fluid and professional, GIFs are becoming
easier to create, thanks to Web-based apps like GIFSoup and Gifninja,
which allow people to create them in an instant, said Brad Kim, the
editor of Know Your Meme, a site that tracks Web fads of the moment.
And in a world where so much daily communication takes place by text,
GIFs are being used by Web geeks as a visual way to drive home a written
point. To celebrate good news, they might insert a dorky celebratory
dance from “The Office.” If they are feeling flirty, Amanda Seyfried’s coy wave
from “Mean Girls” will help make the point. In this sense, GIFs
function as glorified emoticons to punctuate a point when, say, typing
out a blog comment.
These pop-cultural GIFs have gained cultural currency as a way to
distill big televised moments into short visual bites, often with a
humorous bent. Such GIFs are often live-edited by editors at social news
sites like BuzzFeed, and disseminated instantly, one step ahead of
tomorrow’s water-cooler topics, said Mike Hayes, the social media editor
of BuzzFeed.
Recent examples include Taylor Swift’s
singalong to a Bob Marley tune during last weekend’s Grammy
presentations, Beyoncé avoiding a wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl
and Michelle Obama’s apparent eye-roll at John Boehner at last month’s post-inauguration luncheon.
“A lot of viral GIFs we see these days are real-time snippets of what’s
trending in the viral video circuit, news and pop culture,” Mr. Kim
said. “In a way, GIF is taking over TV shows like ‘The Soup’ or ‘Best
Week Ever’ as the more accurate pop culture barometer of our time.”
The cultural currency of GIFs has not gone unnoticed. The august Oxford
American Dictionaries voted “GIF” as the word of the year for 2012,
beating out “Eurogeddon” (the potential financial collapse of the euro
zone) and “superstorm.”
“The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool
with serious applications including research and journalism, and its
lexical identity is transforming to keep pace,” Katherine Martin, the
head of the United States dictionaries program at Oxford University
Press, was quoted as saying.
The GIF has also captured the attention of the art world. To mark the
format’s 25th birthday, Tumblr and Paddle8, an online auction house,
held a GIF festival called “Moving the Still,”
where public submissions were curated by a panel that included the
artist Richard Phillips, the musician Michael Stipe and the writer James
Frey. Fifteen of more than 3,500 submissions were chosen and exhibited
in a 35,000-square-foot warehouse during Art Basel Miami Beach in December.
The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens has been examining the format in installations, including the current Under Construction,
which features a 50-foot seamless projection in the lobby featuring
thousands of old GIF files preserved from GeoCities, the once-popular
Web hosting service.
To Carl Goodman, the museum’s executive director, the GIF provides a
link between today’s technologically sophisticated visual culture and
the 19th century, before movies, when short bursts of looping motion
captured the public imagination on moving-picture devices like the
zoetrope.
“The GIF,” he said, “occupies very fertile ground between the still and the moving image.”
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