It used to be trolls lived in chat rooms and blog comment threads. Invisible, cowardly idiots who picked fights with everyone just to get attention and moved on before being banned and ostracized. A troll was a special kind of angry nut.
Now a troll is a blogger, a critic, or someone who said something harsh about someone's work once.
It's the end of an era. (But the redefinition of "critic" as "a troll who inspires" maybe isn't so bad.)
Let's try the argument from the previous post again, from a slightly different angle.
Will Brand says:
The preference for GIF as a medium, it seems to me, has nothing to do whatsoever with its compression algorithms, a teensy bit to do with the retro appeal of a limited color palette, and a whole lot to do with the fact that - as the very existence of your remix culture indicates - it's so easily interchanged.
That was after I questioned whether the word "interchange" in the acronym Graphics Interchange Format was the main reason someone might use the GIF format. My revised reply:
The reason the GIF above, by stage, got six "faves" on dump.fm and five "likes" on Google Reader probably isn't because people thought, "oh this is something I can remix" but rather because it appeals on a more fundamental level: a combination of visual poetry, psychological investigation, critique, and humor.
(The rhetoric strengthens when the GIF show's square peg isn't semi-apologetically talking about something he made.) Let's flesh it out some more. Stage's GIF could be remixed but why would it be? It feels complete, hard to improve on. A dense, convoluted highway of interlocking triangles (which probably started as an automatic, scribbly gesture in a 3D drawing program of some kind) bobs lasciviously; it's the kind of robotic, sexualized reduction that so intrigued Marcel Duchamp in works from the Large Glass to the rotoreliefs. There is also a bobbing countermotion: a black blur passes from right to left in a way that is difficult to puzzle out even though it's right in front of your eyes.
This rocking and scrolling movement leaves indexical traces of itself on two axes: in the upper right thin scan lines make an intriguing horizontal pattern, while below thicker lines suggest a column or waterfall. Anchoring all this movement, mutely indifferent to it, is an unmoving field of dots, a grey matrix both apart from but completely integrated into the "foreground" activity.
This mesh of effects and counter-scenarios exists by the simplest of means, a couple dozen frames that can be read instantly on any computer browser. It could be juxtaposed with other images, placed on web pages with ads and porn, accompanied by text struggling to explain it but it's always going to read as an autonomous work. This is why the GIF format appeals to artists: the possibility that a quirky, inviolate, individuated expression can emerge that will be better than bulletin boards, better than process, better than overdetermined academic ideas of relational, groupcentric, faux-interactive art.
The discussion I had with Will Brand about animated GIFs a while back went south about the moment he used the word "butthurt." Nevertheless, here's the crux of the argument:
Brand says:
The preference for GIF as a medium, it seems to me, has nothing to do whatsoever with its compression algorithms, a teensy bit to do with the retro appeal of a limited color palette, and a whole lot to do with the fact that - as the very existence of your remix culture indicates - it's so easily interchanged.
This was after I questioned whether the word "interchange" in the acronym Graphics Interchange Format was the main reason someone might use the GIF format. Anyway, reply:
My guess is that the reason people put [the] "OptiDisc" [GIF] on their websites isn't because they thought, "oh this is something I can remix" but rather because it appealed on some more fundamental level. I'm interested in what that fundamental level is--probably a combination of formal properties, psychological investigation, critique, humor--and "remixability" comes somewhere further down the list.
Slight self-wince: the "f" word is usually best avoided because once it's out there people say "ah, so you're a formalist." Well, no, only an idiot suggests form is content... I did a better job of manifesto-izing earlier and I like Gene McHugh's discussion of how painterly interests could be adapted to a new medium. Brand knows the reasoning, he just doesn't agree, and continued throughout the thread to proffer his more theoretically correct take. (At least he didn't overtly talk about relational aesthetics.) By the end of the discussion he was telling me I should be happy to have the validation of the show.
Afterthought: Much of this is already moot because now that GIFs have gone mainstream we have to talk about them in a less self-conscious way. Some may feel trapped between the Scylla of social sculpture and the Charybdis of GIFs that look like 1940s art photography with a slight twitch. (hat tip DS)
The Netflix movies I've been watching lately are mostly French: Enter the Void (well, South American French), Irma Vep, Pierrot Le Fou, Mon Uncle, Playtime, Mr. Hulot's Holiday, La Jetee, Masters of Time, Fantastic Planet...
So much self-reflection and paradox: worlds within worlds, movies about making movies...
Those Tati films, in particular, can be watched over and over. The restaurant scene in Playtime is some of the most perfectly organized chaos ever filmed.
But it must be added that the Netflix diet also includes copious Japanese monster movies: Son of Godzilla, Mothra, Ghidorah the Three Headed Monster, War of the Gargantuas (with Russ Tamblyn!).
Here are tragedy, scale, naked displays of emotion, and relentless corny humor.
The common thread in these extremes is a sense of beauty and style. America does unidimensional, ugly, redneck vulgarity very well (our Internet Art is steeped in it) but it gets old.
pass the aoxomoxoa, please!
from poliedros en al arte
(16th Century, I think)
via dataisnature (essential reading/viewing--j1p2m3 and sarcoptiform especially take note of this post)
