March 2011

Blogger Hrag Vartanian mentions Paddy Johnson's animated GIF show in this short video Q&A on learning that Rhizome.org was selling an animated GIF at the Armory art fair in NY. Rhizome director Lauren Cornell only mentions the selling strategy for one GIF in the interview, which is to "take the work offline so the collector can have it locally." This seems to mean selling a USB or thumb drive with the GIF along with a certificate of authenticity from the artist. "Take it offline" could just mean download it but more likely it means removing the GIF from the internet and locking up the rights for the single owner, which wouldn't be very, um, open source. I asked for clarification but haven't heard anything.

After a bunch of shouting in Vartanian's comments (about his approach to the interview) I added this comment:

Talked to a couple of my net artiste friends about "taking the work offline so the collector can have it locally." The drift seems to be, yeah, it sucks, maybe the collectors will have the good sense to post the GIF and put it back in circulation, and ultimately we don't care how non-open-source Cornell has to be to get people to buy GIFs--it's important for new media type art to be making inroads in the gallery world. So there you have it.

Update: The artist whose GIF was being sold by Rhizome says in the Vartanian blog thread that it was her decision to "take the work offline." I guess that answers the question about whether it will continue to circulate. More.

Canv.as, a venture capital-funded, talk-with-pictures social media website launched by 4Chan founder Moot, was anticipated by some to be a challenger for Dump.fm, the premiere, non-venture-capital-funded, talk-with-pictures website where people have been chatting and posting pics and animations for over a year now. Reports are coming in and wanted to note a couple of them here. Ryder says:

canvas seems cool, the content currently sux cuz not that many interesting people are on it.. lotta really old 4chan memes as expected.. and a lot of "moot is god", but the posting system is good.. i like how there are more emotions besides "liking" which u can assign to an image.. downfalls include ugly 2.0 design (in my opinion), hard to interact with people while easy to interact with threads.. (much like the older image boards).. mainly content right now is the huge draw back..and they have a little image editor that lets u draw on pictures and write text.. seeing this in action i kinda think its pretty lame.. reason being all images end up looking like the same scribbled garbage.. not much art to doodling with a mouse...

Whenthennow adds detail:

thoughts:

1. no gifs???
2. NO GIFS???
3. oh, okay. There are gifs, they just don’t instantly show up as an animation. You have to click a “play” button to get animated gifs to… ahem… animate.
4. the sticker system needs a little work. First of all, its difficult for new users to discern what each sticker is supposed to represent. I’m all for a system of incentivization, but its difficult to tell which stickers are supposed to incentivize and which aren’t meant to deincentivize right off the bat. Although, maybe that’s not the point. And, if it isn’t, then why are they there?
5. However, I really like that just about every image on a screen can be stickered, regardless of whether or not you’re viewing the thread the image is from. It creates a better sense that the site is active instead of passive.
6. I like that Moot was a part of this, many of the images already have a /b/ feel to them without all the /b/ filth. People tend to only discuss the bad parts of 4chan w/o mentioning the good, most of which have been documented on ED [Encyclopedia Dramatica -ed.]. However, I think a lot of 4chans mythology, memes, and terminology are going to be lost on uninformed users. It’s off-putting and doesn’t leave room for new users.
7. No pre-animated animated gifs. I’m still hung up on this. Maybe it was because the narrative in dump for a few weeks was that canv.as was supposed to be a “dump killer”. I mean, I haven’t been on 4chan in awhile, but 420chan fixed the no animated gif interface awhile ago. I’m not sure if you guys read art fag city, but 2010 was the year of the gif, and it looks like they’re here to stay, at least for a bit.
8. The remix interface is swell, I wish dump had something like this. It’s frustrating to have to open PS to make simple edits. Holy shit, an undo and redo button, all on-line image editing software needs this, thx.
9. Oh, “work-friendly” eh? Looks like someone is trying to distance himself from /b/. Lets see how long that rule lasts.
10. The majority of the stickers are friendly, meaning you have to manually type dislike into a thread. Additionally, this dislike is not seen outside a thread, which is a bummer. Less democratic that I would have like 4chan 2.0 to be.

It doesn't sound too appealing, and likely will follow my hopscotch approach to nascent social media (skipped Facebook, embraced Twitter, skipped Tumblr, embraced Dump). It remains to be seen whether Canv.as will be written about in art terms, such as this essay on Dump.fm for artcritical.com by Eric Gelber, or whether it will be more of a novelty site like memegenerator that art types periodically take over and/or colonize.