March 2012

PBS does "animated jifs" - part 4

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ripps_anti-GIF_thesis

Above is a revised version of Ryder Ripps' original "stop talking about GIFs" rant. When I first encountered Ripps a couple of years ago he was a big fan of GIFs; now he thinks talking about them too much will somehow endanger web animation as we know it.

This sudden concern was touched off by a rather bad PBS documentary short where 80% of the interviewees pronounced GIF as "jif" (among other problems). Ripps didn't go postal over the documentary, though. He believes major media always lies and misrepresents its subjects; presumably that's why he appeared on the same PBS program last year. What angers him is that other people are criticizing and fact-checking PBS's treatment of GIFs. Giving his logic every benefit of a doubt, because PBS did a poor job of explaining GIFs, correcting it just makes it worse, to the detriment of all other forms of web animation.

But what other web animation cultures should we be discussing? Macromedia Flash and the people who embrace it? The brave new world of iPad-based HTML5 animation? Subversive uses of badly compressed YouTubes? For the last few years we've been discussing GIFs as a low-entry-level, vernacular, "native" way to animate on the Web and it's been fun. Ripps even co-created a site (dump.fm) where talented GIF-makers flourish. It's not a "GIF site" but that's what you see a lot of when you logon (now by invitation-only).*

PBS emphasized recent attempts to clean up and dignify GIFs by calling them cinemagraphs. According to Ripps, we're not allowed to have an opinion on that because TV always lies. Thanks for your support -- go make a cinemagraph now.

*Update: Am told dump registration has re-opened.

Update 2: What we've been calling PBS is actually a producer of near-infomercials under contract to PBS. See later post. It's ultimately PBS' name on the product but worth mentioning in the context of a "media always lies" discussion. By "four walling" content like this it's possible they are lying in a new and different way!

sketch_i7

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sketch_i7

with ditko sample ("dread dormammu") from the internet
MSPaintbrush, MSPaint (Windows 7), some lousy Photoshop brushes

PBS does "animated jifs" - part 3

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Olia Lialina has also questioned the accuracy of PBS's Off Book documentary on animated GIFs:

The historical part in the beginning is a disaster. The first few seconds of the video already mention "the Web 1.0 of the 70's, 80's and 90's". Come on ... I mean you don't need to know web history and GIF history to make GIFs and to admire them, but if you put yourself in front of the camera to talk about "the birth of the medium" check at least some basic facts. There was no web in the 70's and the 80's. The web started in 1993. If you like you can also count from 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee invented the HTTP protocol. I never do, but in this context it would be at least catchy. This way you could say that animated GIFs and the WWW are of the same age. After all animated GIFs as we know them now started with version number 89a.

On what Ryder Ripps has called "some weird Google docs comment thread" (set up by Paddy Johnson to fact-check PBS), the person who talked about the "Web 1.0 of the '70s, '80s and '90s" in the Off Book program, Patrick Davison, says he mis-spoke.

Update: Responding on Facebook to Lialina's post, Ripps also says discussing GIFs is "retarded" (and he's not talking about the slow frame rate), likening it to painters arguing about "how fucking paint is made and how to pronounce gesso." We've been down this road, with Ripps insisting GIFs are "just another format for animation." Right, because you can put a YouTube on your blog and set it for infinite loop and it'll just boot right up the way you want it to, and it'll be easy for others to save to their drives, edit, and share!

Update 2: My original paraphrase of Ripps' gesso quip was inaccurate so I changed the language to his exact words. I'm not a Facebook member or I'd link to his comments on Lialina's article so you could read them yourselves. The reason we're talking about a file format is because PBS did a show on a file format. Ripps, from his position on the sidelines, thinks we should be talking on the Google doc about "the people or culture behind" web animation. I'm sorry if my comments on the doc don't sufficiently recapitulate 10 years of blog writing - I thought I made a few good points.

Update 3: Michael Manning sent a link [removed, see below], thanks - if you're logged in to Facebook you should be able to read this. I got it all secondhand, via screenshot.

Update 4: Instead of a link to Facebook, here is the screenshot Ripps asked to have sent to me, where he also expresses surprise that Olia Lialina would expect PBS (a network on which he has appeared) to be "honest or accurate or give a shit."

Update 5: PBS or PBS contractor.

Hair GIFs and the Male Gaze

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cinemagraphs-111

Above is a fairly typical example of "cinemagraphs," or what Paddy Johnson has called "hair GIFs," due to their ubiquitous strands of blowing hair. A fashion model with tens of thousands of tumblr followrs and an Atlantic article last year brought this uber-kitschy style to a large Web audience, giving the lie to claims by Ryder Ripps, Brad Troemel and others that democratic "liking" has anything to do with art. People also "like" Thomas Kinkade and McDonald's hamburgers.

We're talking about this now because PBS uncritically promoted this trend, actually just a couple of designer teams working in the fashion world, in a recent documentary short.* One of the teams, Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg (who made the image above), make loud claims for their work as some kind of new art form, or advanced or enhanced photography. It's not new if you've ever seen a stereogram, hologram, or lenticular postcard, and in terms of art theory it's pretty retrograde.

A famous essay from the '70s by Laura Mulvey explained how the masculine gaze drives moviemaking: the story is about a man and some dilemma he solves, the woman is there to give his plight added sympathy, but the problem is, when she is on camera for any length of time, the action stops dead because we just want to stare at her.

Laura Mulvey, from "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 1975 [PDF]

The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative.

This problem was solved, Mulvey suggests, by having the woman be a dancer or showgirl so you're supposed to be staring at her. Or to make a "buddy film" where another man provides the sympathy factor.

Hair GIFs reverse the problem described by Mulvey but don't do much in the way of anti-objectifying. Instead of a gaze magnet (icon) interrupting the flow of cinema we have a cinematic element disrupting the icon. The result isn't so much subversive as unintentionally comedic. The mood is blown with every robotic swing of a forelock.

*Update: PBS or PBS contractor.