February 2011

animated GIFS: struggle for the moral high ground

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A couple of months ago artist Man Bartlett announced that he could no longer remain silent about the course of art on the Internet and specifically had to express his beef with the animated GIF.

Some unfortunate words like "post-hipster" and "depressingly vapid" got slung around and one of my pages got linked to so I replied by asking Bartlett some questions, essentially trying to move to specifics from flame mode.

He replied on Twitter and the answer is...he's not going to reply! This recalls the Paris Peace talks during the Vietnam war where the US kept proposing different designs for conference tables, thus forestalling actual talks:

manbartlett
@tommoody Turn comments on on your blog and I'll attempt to answer them. You make some worthwhile points: http://is.gd/kcK9Z

tommoody
thanks, @manbartlett but--you can't respond on your own blog? hyperlinks make speedy communication possible!

manbartlett
@tommoody I could, but won't create a new post to answer your questions. Post them in the comments of my original post then?

tommoody
...@manbartlett: arguing about where to have the argument is a great way to avoid substantive discussion

tommoody
if it's not worth two blog posts it's probably not something you care about or have much stake in, @manbartlett (i.e., web animation)

And that's where it sits. Talks stalled; GIF wars rage.

Around the web

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Social media compound eye photography: 30+ views of the same modernist sculpture, Richard Lippold's Ad Astra (via dataisnature)

Secret Ninja, by Duncan Alexander: (i) wall with independently scrolling brick layers seen through eyehole or possibly (ii) gas giant planet made of masonry

lugia meets sinusoidal turbulence

some new twitter.com/vvorks, e.g., "tennis ball hovers before Christian tableau painting while man squats on the museum floor"

Too Much Concept, which one hopes will be the antidote to all self-conscious conceptual-art-on-the-Net projects that keep us stuck in the eternally recursive moment of Douglas Huebler, John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt, et al. Not sure that more imitations of 1968-1972 are the way out of this loop but there are good ideas on this page. It will be hard for most people to wrap their minds around artists poking fun at artists who think they are poking fun at other artists, not to stand in the way of complexity.

And last, a note to California-based internet artists: No more pictures of the Hollywood sign, please?

Umbrico in situ

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umbrico

screenshot - detail of post on Vvork re: Penelope Umbrico

Captured on 1280 x 1024 screen (the last square aspect screen in existence).
The reason people want nice, regular corporate social media sites is so this kind of chaos won't happen.
The design team will resize your images for you and make sure they stay within layout boundaries

See previous post. The vastness of Umbrico's project (aggregations of photos on storefront windows) is conveyed on the internet by having a jpeg 2000 pixels wide that necessitates side to side scrolling and penetrates other content on the page.

Compare and Contrast

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this image on Vvork, attributed to Penelope Umbrico

with

this GIF by Kevin Bewersdorf, with a technical assist from Paul Slocum

The Umbrico jpeg says "large salon-style hanging of illegible photos that may or may not exist in real space." A sense of great density of visual information is conveyed without any associated meaning. In the Bewersdorf each component GIF is basically legible, despite this being a reduced GIF version of a high definition video that was shown in New York a couple of years ago. "Legible" in the sense that you can read off its individual parts--flame, fly, beating heart, eyeball, candy cane--as opposed to "blur, grey-green blur, slightly larger grey-green blur, etc."