January 2011

Blogger vs animated GIFs

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Animated GIF complainers, you are in good company: most of the big Web companies completely agree with you. Blogger (the popular blogging software owned by Google) also doesn't allow you to upload animated GIFs to its image server--it converts them to single frame GIFs. You have to upload them elsewhere and link to them, or "hotlink" them off others' sites. Lets add that to the burgeoning list I noted in an earlier interview:

I like them aesthetically as "moving bitmaps" but part of their appeal is also that they've fallen through the cracks of the software giants' plans for world domination. Google Images doesn't include an "animated GIF" checkbox (only non-moving GIFs, and only in the advanced search), the Safari and Chrome browsers handle GIFs poorly, Facebook doesn't allow them, and people complain that even tumblr limits your ability to use them. They are becoming like the abandoned playgrounds and swimming pools taken over by skaters in the '70s, or the zone of the "recently outmoded" that, according to Dan Graham, is a good place for artists to be working.

Side salad for internet beef

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lettuce1 beef lettuce1

Strange times for animated GIFs: at the same time people struggle to explain what they are to a largely paint-on-canvas addicted art world, voices of angry reaction claim they receive too much attention.

Note to Man Bartlett, next time you write about animated GIFs, please consider:

--is a science demonstration GIF (e.g., an animation showing the transformation of a Moebius strip into a Boy's Surface) insincere? does an artist's appropriation of it automatically make it insincere?
--are uses of GIFs in the culture (as jokes, gags) always the same as uses of GIFs to make "art" statements a la Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, et al?
--how might a dump.fm user page be different from an animation log on a blog? (You do know how dump works.)
--might GIFs be at the same place photography once was (that is, rejected as a "serious" medium) or will their ephemeral nature always place them on the outside?
--can a file extension be only about aesthetics and post-hipster at the same time? do hipsters care about aesthetics?
--couldn't use of twitter as a medium also be considered trendy and hip and raise questions as to its insincerity?
--how might "just plain weak images" differ from what Boris Groys has called "the weak universalism"?

gold machine cosmos

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frankhats_tile_yellowmachine_crop_6frames

Made this GIF (the machinery part of the above) from a science animation I saved from dump a while back (also this one, where the motion goes two ways--poorly). frankhats incorporated it into a larger tiled page (layered with other images and patterns made by him, mirrrroring, and robocide) that is pretty spectacular.

I captured the frankhats page and made a single 1.6 MB GIF that isn't quite as detailed but features some of the high spots and is more portable. The GIF above is a cropped, 6 frame version of that one.

Am going to go on Craigslist and look for an art critic who can explain this work.

Update: Need some text filler (too close to the piano) so here's Leo Steinberg:

The flatbed picture plane makes its "...symbolic allusion to hard surfaces, or any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data are entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed - whether coherently or in confusion. It does not simulate vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals. It does not depend on a head-to-toe correspondence with human posture, but insists on an essentially new orientation, in which the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of nature but of operational processes… it is not the actual physical placement of the image that counts. It is the psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative confrontation, that tends to regard the tilt of the picture plane from vertical to horizontal and is expressive of a radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture."

Update: Made a slight tweak to the 1.6 MB GIF version of the tile page. Still thinking about it.

"Duo for Piano and Shark"

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steinway_model-bshark

"Duo for Piano and Shark" [mp3 removed]

I often think about live "chamber" style music that combines acoustic and electronic instruments--this is an exaggerated, joky example. The truth is, I care less and less about live playing as compared to the "electronic object" of a studio work. This relates somewhat to what I was saying about the artist being best invisible. But there's nothing wrong with, ahem, visual cues as to where the music is coming from or going.

"Shark Shanty"

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"Shark Shanty" [mp3 removed]

A short melody played on the Shark (Reaktor) synth with fairly heavy compression--not sure how this will fare on smaller speakers. The tune was originally a demo for the very basic SQP (Reaktor) sequencer module (used to trigger the notes) that I rewrote to take advantage of the zany portamento (glide) between notes.