Search Results for: animated jifs

Tim Bavlnka's PBS’s Problematic Representation of GIFs, Culture, and Art gives a close reading of that awful PBS segment on animated GIFs a while back. He's especially good on how the show packages so-called cinemagraphs as a more advanced form of expression, over the lowly GIFs whose file extension they share.

The final segment of the video deals with cinemagraphs. These are quickly established in contrast to GIFs, and it makes me angry. I find many of the statements made by these creators to be somewhat deluded in order to serve their own established personas. Kevin Burg states that “I think there’s opportunities in this kind of hybrid medium to show people something they’ve never seen before. We have these moments that can just exist forever.” There are a few things going on here. First, Burg is quick to mention that their work is a hybrid medium, not the lowly and pathetic GIF. This connects to the statements above about how their work is more closely related to photography than to something else. Not only that, but the music of the video changes to a somber and serious piece. It established this form of GIF as more auteured and separate than those wacky GIF makers we saw previously.

Bavlnka also develops an idea I tossed out in the post Hair GIFs and the Male Gaze:

Like the gaze of the privilege of patriarchy, the camera’s gaze enforces a system of power over women. This is an important point to bring up due to some of the statements of the artist involved. Beck states “It’s so voyeuristic. You look but you feel like you should look away, but then you can watch it, and then you can watch it some more and it’s like ooooh.” This is an oddly placed bit in the discussion and forces a sexualized perspective at the consumption of their own work. Voyeurism is that system of power that [theorist Laura] Mulvey is talking about, where the audience watches over the powerlessness of women and engage in the powerfulness of men. Moody adds “you’re supposed to be staring at her” and thus enforcing power over her. Beck seems somewhat oblivious to this connotation, which I find a bit troubling. They capture forever a moment of a sexualized woman, and she becomes powerless in her GIF form, forever victim to the gaze of the viewer. Its associations with the fashion industry just seems to perpetrate the power of gaze over models and the enforcement of beauty and aesthetics over women because of it.

But as I noted, the joke's on them because cinemagraphs are too unintentionally ludicrous to be particularly erotic.

more jifs / gatekeepers

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!

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.

Paddy Johnson has a post on PBS's rather awful, inaccurate, commercially-oriented documentary short on animated GIFs. She has made a Google document of the show's transcript where people can pick their bones with the content on a line by line basis.

Most people interviewed on the show have a business interest in GIFs, either through involvement with a social media site ("you can use GIFs to enhance your persona!") or in their day jobs in fashion and/or photography. Nothing inherently wrong with that but it explains much of the "new art form/unexplored country" rhetoric you hear over and over -- that's pure bizspeak. One interviewee has some academic affiliation and says all the wonky historical stuff (interestingly, he's the only one who doesn't call them "jifs"). His wonkery is misleading for reasons being explored in the Google doc. I've added a couple of comments to that doc and will do a post later summarizing some of the errors and wrong impressions created by PBS on the topic of GIFs.

Also, if I can find any fashion GIFs that load reasonably quickly, will try to do an analysis of the claims that they are art. On PBS they blow by very quickly, making it difficult to test what at least one interviewee says about watching GIFs repeatedly and finding new meanings in them.

Earlier post on this.

Update: PBS or PBS contractor.

[YouTube]

In this short documentary, PBS explains animated GIFs in a way that makes you never want to make or look at one again.

It's the usual narrative: GIFs were web 1.0, then they went away (except they didn't), embraced by young people around '07 (right when everyone moved to Facebook, which didn't allow GIFs), then movie clips on tumblr, then ART (cinemagraphs).

No true GIF artistes could be found for an interview because they're all semi-anonymous, so PBS used the cast of Ace of Cakes.

The pretensions of calling GIFs "cinemagraphs" have been much lampooned (Paddy Johnson dubbed them "hair GIFs") but the Net is so vast none of the smirks made it to the PBS home office.

Was writing down phrases as I watched:

"Beyond the limits of the filename"
"You have... the glitch art..."
"It makes you so cool."
Fashion Jifs!
"It's about doing the next thing in technology."
"It allows a moment to live on."
"We see [cinemagraphs] as an evolution of photography."
"Essentially something you've never seen before" (accompanied by meaningful nod).

Fortunately some YouTube commenters are helping to straighten out this mess:

*cough* 4chan. Also, Unisys' snit when it tried to extract money from the patent on LZW compression, used in the GIF format, slowed uptake.

and

"Jif" is a peanut butter brand.

and

Sorry folks, but the correct pronunciation has always been GIF as in Growl or Goon or Ground or Guess or Gimmick, etc. No 'Jif'.

I only know one hard-shell GIF maker who calls them Jifs -- he goes by the pronunciation favored by, well, the inventor of the GIF but "the street" overran that long ago.

hat tip lh - ongoing edits - the horror

Update: PBS or PBS contractor.