This essay offers an exploration of the recent phenomenon of GIF art, in light of the cultural attitude that has come to be known under the term of ‘metamodernism’. Unlike other recent theories (New Realism, Hypermodernity, Altermodernism, and so on) that have tried to conceptualize the ‘cultural logic’ of the present age as a kind of neo-modernist dismissal of postmodernism, metamodernism is not intended to dispose of the notion of postmodernism all together. Instead, it is defined as ‘an oscillation between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism’ (Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker). The article argues that GIF art can be held as a major contemporary expression of a truly metamodernist ‘structure of feeling’, following a refunctionalizing, in artistic terms, the Graphics Interchange Format. GIF art is today an extraordinarily vital, well-diffused and fragmented field of experimentation, where new uses of the moving image are continuously developed and tested. Its interest for film studies lies in the fact that it almost literally reinvents the cinematographic device (disposif) in a digital context, to the point that it has been termed ‘a form of minicinema entirely native to the Internet’ (Tom Moody).
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GIF Art in the Metamodern Era
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GIF Art in the Metamodern Era
Monica Dall’Asta, Università di Bologna




Abstract

    This essay offers an exploration of the recent phenomenon of GIF art, in light of the
    cultural attitude that has come to be known under the term of ‘metamodernism’.
    Unlike other recent theories (New Realism, Hypermodernity, Altermodernism, and
    so on) that have tried to conceptualize the ‘cultural logic’ of the present age as a kind
    of neo-modernist dismissal of postmodernism, metamodernism is not intended to di-
    spose of the notion of postmodernism all together. Instead, it is defined as ‘an oscilla-
    tion between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism’ (Timotheus Vermeulen
    and Robin van den Akker). The article argues that GIF art can be held as a major
    contemporary expression of a truly metamodernist ‘structure of feeling’, following a
    refunctionalizing, in artistic terms, the Graphics Interchange Format. GIF art is today
    an extraordinarily vital, well-diffused and fragmented field of experimentation, where
    new uses of the moving image are continuously developed and tested. Its interest for
    film studies lies in the fact that it almost literally reinvents the cinematographic device
    (disposif) in a digital context, to the point that it has been termed ‘a form of mini-
    cinema entirely native to the Internet’ (Tom Moody).


The Metamodern Dialectic

   Statements about the end of postmodernism have acquired wide currency in
cultural discourses for at least two decades now. Linda Hutcheon, one of the
leading scholars in postmodernism, declared it had reached the condition of ‘a
thing of the past’ as early as 2003.1 Many since then have attempted to offer a
convincing description of the ‘cultural logic’ of our post-postmodernist times.
The resurgence of certain modernist traits (like a new interest in history and a di-
stinct experimental attitude) in current cultural production has spurred various
theoretical formulations and definitions, from Remodernism to Automodernism,
from Digimodernism to Hypermodernity, and more.2

1
 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 165.
2
  For a critically informed presentation of all of these trends, and more, see David Rudrum and
Nicholas Stavris, Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of
the Early 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

                                        Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVI, no. 26-27, Spring/Summer 2016
                                         Monica Dall’Asta


   The problem with all of these different theoretical paradigms is that they con-
ceive of the contemporary cultural landscape as the result of a rupture with,
or a departure from, postmodernism, while at the same time structuring their
definitions of the ‘new’ around aspects that can be said to belong legitimately to
the postmodern condition. If, as Alan Kirby states, ‘postmodernist culture was
rooted in all kinds of historical, social, economic and political developments’,
then one can certainly agree with his conclusion that ‘it would take something
wrenchingly huge to sweep this away’.3 However, his identification of this ‘huge’
transformation with the advent of the digital era seems quite inadequate to play
the role of what, in Fredric Jameson’s terms, should be characterized as the end
of ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’, that is, as a systemic reversal that we are
far yet to experience.4
   A more persuasive attempt to describe the present configuration of contem-
porary cultural production in relation to postmodernism has been advanced by
Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. Their notion of ‘metamoderni-
sm’ is particularly intriguing since it allows one to explain why so many aspects
of the previous paradigm still survive today within a cultural frame that does not
comply with the nihilistic stance of postmodernism. Defined as ‘a kind of infor-
med naivety’ or ‘a pragmatic idealism’, metamodernism is offered as a tentative
synthesis, or, more precisely‘, an oscillation between aspects of both modernism
and postmodernism’.5
   The strength of this concept is that it does not attempt, as other recent theories,
to dispose of postmodernism by proposing a simple, linear progression from one
paradigm to another, but (just as postmodernity did not dispose of modernity) it
incorporates major aspects of the postmodernist attitude (like irony and decon-
struction) into a new ‘structure of feeling’ that revamps the typically modernist
tension toward experimentation and discovery, sincerity of expression, pursuit
of truths, critique and détournement, and many more cultural practices that all
speak of a new urge for utopia even in a context dominated by pessimism.6
   The main novelty in the oscillating attitude of metamodernism is the return of
the dialectic after a long period in which it was displaced in favour of a playful


3
  Alan Kirby, Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure
our Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 27.
4
  Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New
York: Verso, 1991).
5
  Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, ‘Notes on Metamodernism’, Journal of Aes-
thetics and Culture, 2 (2010), 1–14 <http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/
view/5677/6306> [accessed 20 March 2016].
6
  The notion of ‘structure of feeling’ is derived from Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 132–34: ‘The term is difficult, but
“feeling” is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of “world-view” or
“ideology”. […] we are concerned with meaning and values as they are actively lived and felt....
Structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social
semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately
available’.

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                                 GIF Art in the Metamodern Era


indifference for conflict and history.7 Where poststructuralist thinkers such as
Deleuze, Lyotard and Derrida worked to pulverize the dichotomies of modernist
dialectical thought (as well as the negative energy on which they were based) into
an infinite multiplication of affirmative differences that no longer aimed at a syn-
thesis, metamodernism rediscovers contradiction to simply inhabit it, and even rest
in it, in a way that does not show any confidence in the modernist faith in linear
progress, or what Jameson calls ‘the ideologic conviction of gradualism’.8 In other
words, whereas modernists conceived of conflict as a moment in a dialectical pro-
cess moving toward the telos of history, the metamodernists see it as a permanent
reality that will never be overcome by the advent of a final synthesis. At the same
time, Vermeulen and van den Akker acutely retrace the origin of so many post-
modernist discourses about the end of history in the very matrix of all modernist
dialectical thinking, that is, Hegel’s ‘positive’ idealism. For some, they write,

    this notion of history dialectically progressing toward some predetermined Telos had
    ended because humankind had realized that this Telos had been achieved (with the
    “universalization of Western liberal democracy”). Others suggested that it had come
    to a conclusion because people realized its purpose could never be fulfilled — indeed,
    because it does not exist.

  Yet in fact ‘history never ended’. The reaction to this new awareness generates
the suspended dialectics that they call ‘metamodernism’:

       The current, metamodern discourse also acknowledges [as in the most critical ver-
    sions of postmodernism] that history’s purpose will never be fulfilled because it does
    not exist. Critically, however, it nevertheless takes toward it as if it does exist. Inspired
    by a modern naïveté yet informed by postmodern skepticism, the metamodern di-
    scourse consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility.9

   The metamodern dialectic then bears some extraordinary similarities to Wal-
ter Benjamin’s ‘dialectics at a standstill’, a notion he developed as an alternative
to the triumphant teleology and unabashed faith in linear progress of orthodox
deterministic materialism.10 Introduced as a strategic conceptual tool to preserve

7
   Of course things here are more complicated than that. As Jameson has shown in Valences of
the Dialectic (London and New York: Verso, 2009), the explicitly counter-dialectical thought of
‘Hegel’s contemporaries critics’ (a chapter devoted to discussing authors like Derrida, Deleuze
and Foucault) is just another articulation of the dialectic that contributes to the general movement
‘towards a spatial dialectic’ that the author sees announced in contemporary culture. While I can-
not discuss Jameson’s view in more detail here, I want to remark that what I call ‘metamodernism’
bears many similarities with his concept of a ‘spatial dialectic’.
8
  Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, p. 29.
9
  Vermeulen and Van den Akker, p. 4.
10
   ‘Ambiguity is the appearance of dialectic in images, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This
standstill is utopia and the dialectical image therefore dream image’. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the
Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Expose of 1935’, in The Arcades Project, ed. by Howard Eiland
and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. by Rold Tiedeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

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                                         Monica Dall’Asta


hope as a ‘weak messianic force’ in front of the impending catastrophe of World
War II (the material demonstration of the fallacies of progressive teleology),
Benjamin’s crystallized dialectic seems to offer the only adequate ‘impossible
possibility’ for the metamodern subjectivity to deal with the anxieties and the
threats of global war, impoverishment and environmental collapse generated by
contemporary capitalism.11 Neither the gradualist dialectic of modernism, nor
the postmodern disavowal of dialectics are better equipped to cultivate resilience
in front of what is felt as a looming disaster. The metamodernist structure of fee-
ling responds with an invitation to look for an improbable way out in any way. If
postmodernism can be characterized as a navigation between islands that appear
deprived of any intrinsic value of their own, whereby meaning is created by the
interconnection provided by the navigation itself, metamodernism can rather be
described as the experience of a sea captain whose ship is sinking and

     has to set sail for one island whilst understanding that each island has its value. For us
     metamodernism is this moment of radical doubt, of constantly, at times desperately,
     repositioning between the islands, finally choosing one. The terms we chose early on
     were [...] oscillation and metaxy. Perhaps elasticism could be another way to describe
     it, in the sense that the captain is tied by an elastic to different islands and the further
     he stretches the band to one island, the more violently the pull, the swing, back to
     another will be — until it snaps, of course.12


The Dialectic as Image

   Metamodernism is then the name for the condition of a subject who inhabits
the contradiction, who finds him/herself in-between a hoard of tensions and has to
choose how to position for the sake of his/her own existence. The sense of urgency
attached to this choice is another element that points to a similarity with Benjamin’s
dialectic at a standstill, and that which makes contradiction appear in a spatial form,
that is, in the form of an image. Benjamin formulates this concept by writing that
‘image is dialectic at a standstill’. In other words, the dialectic of now-time (a word-
ing used to express the form that present takes on for a subject in danger)


1999 [1935]), p. 10. Elsewhere, Benjamin describes the dialectical image as the product of a sud-
den clash between the past and the present. A good illustration of how this peculiar dialectic works
in Benjamin is the ambiguous treatment he reserves to the notion of ‘aura’, whose demise is seen in
completely positive terms in his essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductibility,
and in extremely pessimistic terms in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.
11
   Here again, the notion of an ‘impossible possibility’ meets Jameson’s discussion of Benjamin’s
dialectical messianism: ‘You would not evoke the messianic in a genuinely revolutionary period, a
period in which changes can be sensed at work around you; the messianic does not mean immedi-
ate hope in that sense, perhaps not even home against hope; it is a unique variety of the species
hope that scarcely bears any of the latter’s normal characteristics and that flourishes only in a time
of absolute hopelessness’. Benjamin, Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, p. 177.
12
   Vermeulen and Van den Akker, Notes on Metamodernism.

80
                                 GIF Art in the Metamodern Era


     does not take place by means of concepts, but in form of images. This explains why
     it cannot perform a conciliatory role, since it is only the work of conceptualization
     that which can overcome/abolish effectual contradictions, transforming them into di-
     scourse — while the image contains all antagonist polarities, without offering future
     solutions […]. The dialectic at a standstill is the image that blocks the real into a con-
     stellation charged with tensions.13

   If my linkage of metamodernism to the notion of a spatialized dialectic is cor-
rect, we should now be able to find examples of metamodernist dialectical ima-
ges. Some work has be done in the field of film studies to track down the presen-
ce of a metamodernist sensibility in contemporary cinema. James MacDowell has
brought up the case of what he calls ‘quirky cinema’, a trend he sees represented
by the films of, among others, Michel Gondry, Wes Anderson, Miranda July,
Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze, Jared Hess, Alexander Payne, David O. Russell.
Quirky, he writes,

     is a sensibility made up of tensions: between indie and mainstream, comedy and drama,
     naturalism and artificiality, innocence and experience, and — perhaps above all — ‘iro-
     ny’ and ‘sincerity’. More precisely, it can be broadly described as ‘walking a tightrope
     between a cynically ‘detached’ irony and an emotionally ‘engaged’ sincerity.14

   Coherently with his search for what he calls ‘the tone’ of metamodernist ci-
nema, MacDowell tends to concentrate more on the film’s content, than on its
visual structure. However, when looking for images, and specifically for dialec-
tical images, it seems to me that an even more poignant embodiment of the me-
tamodernist spirit can be found today outside the field of traditional narrative
cinema. GIF art is an excellent case in point. Having emerged as an effort to re-
functionalize in artistic terms the Graphics Interchange Format, which has been
ubiquitously in use in the Internet since 1987, GIF art is today an extraordinary
vital, disseminated, as well as fragmented field that explores new possible uses
of the moving image. The interest of the GIF medium for film studies lays in the
fact that it almost literally reinvents the cinematic device (disposif) in a digital
context, to the point that it has been termed ‘a form of mini-cinema entirely
native to the Internet’.15


13
   Guido Boffo, Nero con bambino. L’antropologia impolitica di Walter Benjamin (Milano: Mimesis,
1999), p. 98 (my translation).
14
   James MacDowell, Quirky, ‘Notes on Metamodernism’ (13 August 2013), <http://www.
metamodernism.com/2010/08/13/quirky/> [accessed 20 March 2016].
15
   The definition is by digital artist Tom Moody, IMG MGMT: Psychotronic GIFs (2008) <http://
www.artfagcity.com/2008/08/05/img-mgmt-psychotronic-gifs> [accessed 20 March 2016]. See also
Moody’s interview in the booklet issued by Distributed Gallery to accompany a 2009 exhibition in Los
Angeles <http://e-rat.org/Distributed%20Gallery/dg.telic.info/>. On Tom Moody and two other gif
artists see Sally McKay, ‘The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills)’,
Art and Education [n.d.] <http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-affect-of-animated-gifs-tom-
moody-petra-cortright-lorna-mills/> [accessed 20 March 2016]. More literature that explores the

                                                                                                 81
                                         Monica Dall’Asta


   Suspended between stillness and movement, GIF images embody the meta-
modern dialectical principle in their own technological structure. Of course they
move, right, but their movement is frozen in an endless repetition of the same
few frames. A new temporal form emerges where fixity coexists with mobility,
variation with monotony, change with stability. The paradoxical constitution of
GIFs thus appears to mimic on the formal level the blocked dialectic of capi-
talism, its incessant pursuit of change that never changes anything — or what
Benjamin first characterized as the ever-new appearance of the ever-same in the
experience of modernity. In a way, the flood of looping images that saturates the
metamodern mediascape has disenchanted the techniques of image reproduc-
tion, by generating a new perceptual habit that provides an automatic ability to
recognize the ever-same in the ever-new. In shrinking the duration of a moving
picture to a few seconds, the GIF image reveals the structural sameness that is
inherent to every product created by means of a recording technique (and what
is a film, ultimately, if not a recording that loops each time it is reproduced?).


GIFs as Dialectical Images

   Characteristic to the GIF image is the short circuit it produces between some
of the most advanced digital technologies (such as motion photography, motion
graphics, or software like Processing and Cinema 4D) and cinema’s history, and
even cinema’s pre-history, reactivating a wide constellation of ancient forms and
techniques of perception such as the stereoscopes, the zoetropes, the phenaki-
stiscopes, chronophotography, lenticular print, and so on.16 The emerging field
of GIF art offers numerous interesting examples. Dain Fagerholm, an illustrator
who specializes in stereograms, presents the viewer with glimpses into a me-
lancholic world of adolescent alienation drawn in blue tones, where monstrous
puppet kids with big heads and huge eyes sit in front of luminous cubes or pri-
sms, either alone, or without seemingly attempting any kind of interpersonal
communication.17 The principle of Marey’s chronophotography is revived and
put in motion by Erdal Inci, a Turkish artist based in Berlin who produces his
GIFs by cloning himself into dozens of identical doubles. In his series titled after


gif-cinema-precinema connection includes the following: Hampus Hagman, ‘The Digital Gesture:
Rediscovering Cinematic Movement Through GIFs’, Refractory (29 December 2012) <http://refrac-
tory.unimelb.edu.au/2012/12/29/hagman/> [accessed 20 March 2016]; Jane Hu, ‘GIF Typologies
and the Heritage of the Moving Image’, Hyperallergic (28 September 2012) <http://hyperallergic.
com/57585/gif-typologies-and-the-heritage-of-the-moving-image/> [accessed 20 March 2016]; A.
D. Jameson, ‘Are Animated Gifs a Type of Cinema?’, Indiewire (17 April 2013) <http://www.in-
diewire.com/2013/04/are-animated-gifs-a-type-of-cinema-133784/> [accessed 20 March 2016].
16
   GIFs can be said to revive, in a very precise way, the aesthetic of the ‘cinema of attractions’, as
they many characteristics with early cinema: silentness, brevity, multiplicity, the sensationalism or
exhibitionism of visual effects. See Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amster-
dam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).
17
   See http://dainfagerholm.blogspot.com [accessed 20 March 2016].

82
                                 GIF Art in the Metamodern Era


a famous essay by Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament (1927), his own body
dressed in black is replicated multiple times, so as to create disturbing arrays of
marching figures that suggest different, and even opposite readings: a fascist troop
or an anarchist rally, an official parade or a ritual choreography performed by a
group of hooded street artists.18 In a more playful mood, artists like Neil Sanders,
Nicolas Fong and Matthias Brown have been experimenting with digital phena-
kistoscopes. Sanders, one of the animators (in the double sense of the word) of
the Australian Loop De Loop team, crams his virtual discs with crowds of little
elastic creatures dancing and bouncing in a classical cartoon style.19 Fong’s mesme-
rizing mandalas, featuring the perpetual mutation of strange zoomorphic figures,
have been included in a music video he made for the BNRS band, Many Chances
(2015).20 Matthias Brown (who also experiments with GIFs in videomaking) em-
ploys the traditional technique of rotoscope animation to produce digital phenaki-
stoscopes and other looping compositions (which include sequential plates that is
reminiscent of Muybridge), all exclusively rendered in black and white.21
   These examples persuasively suggest the metamodern, dialectical nature of
the GIF image. These tiny visual loops plunge the viewer into a perceptual ex-
perience that goes back to the prehistory of cinema, producing a clash between
our digital present and the distant past of the analogic moving image — a perfect
illustration of a spatialized dialectics. What appears as most modern today al-
lows the resurrection of a host of ancient optical toys, the actualization of the
movement that is virtually inscribed in them: just type ‘Dick Balzer’ on Google
and you witness a true explosion of nineteenth-century moving taumatropes,
phenakistoscopes, zoetropes, and animated magic lantern slides from one of the
largest and most amazing collections in the world. At the same time the forms of
so-called pre-cinema are constantly recreated in the work of present-day digital
pratictioners. The marvel of the chromatrope, a spectacular display of moving
colors, once a major attraction for magic lantern (and later early cinema) audi-
ences, is today revived online in hundreds of GIFs.22 James Kerr, who is excep-
tionally popular in social networks as Scorpion Dagger, makes compelling dé-
tournements of Renaissance paintings by means of an elemental type of montage
that brings to mind the mechanical animations of the magic lantern.23



18
   Search for Erdal Inci on Tumblr, Vimeo and Instagram.
19
   See http://neilsanders.com.au. See also the website of the collective http://loopdeloop.org [ac-
cessed 20 March 2016].
20
   Search for Nicolas Fong on Tumblr and Vimeo.
21
   See http://traceloops.com [accessed 20 March 2016].
22
   Some intriguing examples are provided by the anonymous artists who conceal their identity
under the pseudonyms of Hexeosis and Admiral Potato.
23
   Search for Scorpion Dagger on Tumblr. James Kerr has been experimenting with the use of
GIFs in his recent augmented reality art book, Do You Like Relaxing? (Montréal: Anteism, 2015).
Animations can be played live on an iPhone from the pages of a handcrafted art book: <http://
anteism.com/shop/scorpion-dagger-augmented-reality-soft> [accessed 20 March 2016].

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                                          Monica Dall’Asta


   The subterranean connection that links the GIF phenomenon to the prehis-
tory of cinema is made explicit in the construction of new analogical optical toys.
The most intriguing example is the Giphoscope, a machine assembled by Ales-
sandro Scali and Marco Calabrese at the Okkult Motion Pictures studio in Turin,
Italy.24 Based on the principle of the flip-book, this elementary, and yet extremely
elegant device allows the user to play GIFs by hand simply by turning a crank.
The machine is sold together with an optional number of printed GIFs from
a catalogue featuring both works by contemporary artists and brief sequences
from public domain early cinema collections. But the Giphoscope is just one
among several more examples that document the contemporary trend toward
the ‘descent’ of GIFs ‘in real life’, through analogical as well as digital devices.
GIFpop is an initiative created to commercialize the work of digital artists in the
form of large cards produced by means of a lenticular printing process. Again,
GIFpop lenticular animations sold in this form include the work of digital artists
like Davidope, Patakk, Zack Dougherty (Hateplow), Zolloc and others, along-
side a serpentine dance from the early days of film history and a phenakistoscope
from the Richard Balzer collection. IRL GIFs are also the business of Meural, a
digital canvas connected to the Internet that allows you to view high quality GIF
animations on your home wall.
   All of these developments suggest that GIFs can become an extraordinary field
of inquiry for media archaeology. GIF archaeology has become a specific subject
of research in the work of Olia Lialina, a scholar and a net artist who finds her
material in elements from the Web 1.0.25 More generally, we can see how widely
GIFs contribute, through the practice of frame capture, to the continual remedia-
tion of film history, now delivered in the form of tiny fragments to the voracious
cinephilia of a large number of web users. Frame grab GIFs are giving a strong
impulse to the ongoing cinematization of the web,26 but they do so only collaps-
ing the whole history of the moving image into an eternal present where hand-
colored films exist side by side with 16mm documentary productions, panoramic
formats in Technicolor, television programs, videoclips, home movies, and so on.
These scattered fragments, most often generated by anonymous users, provoke an


24
   Loops visible on the giphoscope.com website include sequences excerpted from Edison and Mé-
liès films, as well as from Muybridge’s plates on animal locomotion. For more information about
Calabrese and Scali’s other artistic projects, look for their personal websites <http://okkultmotion-
pictures.tumblr.com> [accessed 20 March 2016].
25
   See Olia Lialina’s continuing reconstruction of the history and prehistory of GIF culture in
her Vernacular Web multimedia essay series (2005–2010): <http://art.teleportacia.org/observa-
tion/vernacular/>; <http://contemporary-home-computing.org/vernacular-web-2/>; <http://
contemporary-home-computing.org/prof-dr-style/>. See also Paddy Johnson, ‘A Brief History of
Animated GIF Art’, parts 1–4, Artnet News (2 and 15 August, 2 and 17 September 2014) <https://
news.artnet.com/art-world/a-brief-history-of-animated-gif-art-part-one-69060> [accessed 20
March 2016].
26
   The process that I call ‘cinematization of the web’ is certainly involved in the ongoing ‘relocation
of cinema’ discussed by Francesco Casetti in The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema
to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

84
                                GIF Art in the Metamodern Era


archaeologic, metamodern reading of the media experience, in which the percep-
tion of history is given on a synchronic, i.e. spatialized, rather than diachronic,
ground.
   An intriguing example is the reinvention of certain visual topoi of both ab-
stract cinema and optical/kinetic art, a common practice among ‘generative’ art-
ists in the field of so-called ‘creative coding’. The most fortunate of these topoi
is perhaps the circular movement of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘rotoreliefs’, famously
used in Anémic Cinéma (1926) to create a hypnotic impression of depth in a
two-dimensional image. Duchamp’s concept of his spinning discs, where sets of
concentric circles move in eccentric fashion, has been exploited dozens of times
in GIFs. The ‘anemic’, i.e. Duchampian, genealogy of much optical and kinetic
art is made explicit in those works that use designs by Victor Vasarely, Marina
Apollonio or Bridget Riley to create mesmerizing bidimensional sculptures in
motion. In this way, artists like Davidope (dvdp), Dave Whyte (beesandbombs),
Dylan Fisher (xverdxse), Joe Winograd, among many others, have opened up a
new enthralling season of digital experimentation for abstract kinetic art.27
   Research in this field has gone in parallel with a process we might describe
as the ‘toyfication of the web’. Several abstract artists have been engaged in de-
veloping online tools that exploit interactivity to produce perfectly gratuitous
perceptual experiences, which again revive the nineteenth-century tradition of
optical toys in the digital context. Hardcore experimentation meets a kind of
childish taste for playing with images that for once is not subjected to the com-
petitive logic of gamification, and can be seen in many examples such as Chris
Shier’s Gifmelter, Vince McKelvie’s Klear.me and Clickdragclick, or Andrew Ben-
son’s Pusher. Bill Domonkos, a digital artist and talented videomaker who works
with found footage, distributes Stereopsis, a free iOS app that allow to watch his
surreal GIFs in stereoscopy.28


GIFs and the Metamodern Critique

   If GIFs embody the metamodern sensibility already at the level of their formal
structure, nothing is more telling of their departure from postmodernism than
the peculiar kind of social and/or political critique some artists try to communi-
cate through their loops. While their satirical wit can be quite aggressive — as
in the case of Peekasso’s political spoofs, which turn Donald Trump, and Hill-
ary Clinton no less, into grotesque artificial puppets — their most characteristic
attitude is a melancholic irony that leaves little place for the euphoria that both
modernism and postmodernism had expressed toward, respectively, engagement
and disengagement.29 The metamodern sensibility arises from the exponential


27
   Search for their names and nicknames on Tumblr, Vimeo, YouTube and Instagram.
28
   See http://www.bdom.com [accessed 20 March 2016].
29
   An eloquent example of Peekasso’s net-artistic strategies is the glittering découpage of a cat,

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disenchantment experienced by a young generation as it witnesses the collapse
of postmodernism’s re-enchantment strategies, and finds itself facing giant global
problems that seem beyond any possible solution. Maybe metamodernism is the
only true postmodernism, since it is only too painfully aware that those problems
are just the heritage of modernity, and it is left with a longing desire for a utopian
way out, which it despairs will ever be found. The naïvete that is often associated
to metamodernism can be compared to that of a grown up child who reacts to a
trauma by embracing her toys and singing a lullaby — she knows this is not going
to change her condition, but helps.
   A grim representation of the artist’s destiny in the age of digital reproduc-
tion is offered by Milos Rajkovic — an artist from Serbia who signs his GIFs as
Sholim — in the loop that opens his The World Was Wonderful series.30 All the
images in this series are characterized by slow movements of only a few figures,
which create a tableau-vivant-like effect, while the only recurring element is a
swarm of flies that keeps turning over piles of waste: the rest of what was once
a ‘wonderful world’. The scenes range from Father Christmas and his reindeers
hung up by their feet, with Christmas lights used as rope (New Year), to a head-
less couple who tries to orientate themselves within a field encumbered with
rubbish, using their white canes as dowsing rods (though actually the woman
is using her stick to position her cell phone and take a selfie of her non-existent
head: Relationship).
   In this context the artist is no more than a surviver too. He is portrayed as a
beggar, sitting on a plastic box, slightly waving as if under the effect of too much
alcohol, his head hanging on his chest, surrounded by fastidious flies. The carton
board at his neck reads: ‘Gif art veteran needs help. God bless’ (Veteran). Rajko-
vic other works are extremely biting too. He specializes in mechanical heads with
all kinds of improbable elements moving in and out of empty orbits, mouths, cra-
niums etc. Five of these GIFs are freakish portraits of as many characters chosen
to embody the American militarist spirit, represented by an American flag in the
background. In Join the Army 2, the Coca Cola logo in the flag connotes the opti-
mism of a smiling military. The man has no eyes, as his upper head hosts instead a
couple of puppet clowns, perpetually going up and down with a piston-like mo-
tion: the smaller clown emerges rhythmically, dressed in uniform and blowing in
a trumpet that spurts blood, from the bust of a larger McDonald’s clown, who in
turn keeps his hands closed in prayer. All of Sholim’s heads oscillate slightly and
usually smile while the movement in their head reveals the agony that is going
on inside: a brain with legs keeps walking endlessly in a Hamster wheel, inside



posted on 15 February 2016, he uses to forward the viewer to a YouTube link featuring General
Wesley Clark’s public declaration that the American military plans after 9/11 was ‘to take out seven
countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and,
finishing off, Iran’. <http://peekasso.tumblr.com/post/139376478483/httpswwwyoutubecom-
watchv-9rc1mepksw> [accessed 20 March 2016].
30
   See this and Rajkovic’s other series at http://sholim.com.

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a cage filled with dollars (Manager); baroque mechanisms allow a shining black
car to spin in the head of an orthodox priest, as on a display platform (Faith);
a machine pumped by two athletic blond women exercising with their sport
equipments bears a faceless head of a woman with a fashionable haircut, which
becomes a frame for a headless female figure seen in the act of taking a selfie (and
the earrings of this Selfie are two spinning skulls used as hooks to hang a couple
of vinyl bags). Each of Sholim’s GIFs is an allegory that is simultaneously satirical
and terribly serious, ironic and grave, suspended between a cheerful cynicism
and the solemnity of a memento mori.31
   One more glimpse in the condition of the contemporary GIF artist is offered by
the intriguing work of Michael Green, a net artist whose creative trace is dispersed
across multiple media (from social networks to commercial sites, from music to
video, from GIFs to Second Life)32. His Balloon Dog Deflated uses a GIF to per-
form a complex conceptual deconstruction of the ultimate icon of postmodernist
art, Jeff Koons’ famous stainless-steel series of sculptures reproducing the shape
and the surface of an inflated balloon dog, in different variants of color. Koons’
balloon series (reproducing a dog, a swan, a rabbit, a flower and so on) are the epit-
ome of postmodern seriality; based on the concept of an indefinite replication of
identical ‘originals’, they were met with a commercial success never attained before
by a living artist. In 2013 Koon’s Balloon Dog (Orange) ‘was sold to an anonymous
telephone bidder for $58.4 million, surpassing initial $55 million estimates, to be-
come “the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction”’, according to
Time.33 The meaning of Green’s ‘deflation’ of such an obviously ‘inflated’ artwork
(in both senses of the phrase) is made clearer by the commercial operation put in
place by the artist himself to sell his GIF. In 2014 Balloon Dog Deflated was put on
auction on eBay for $ 5800, accompanied by a long explanation by the author that
resembles a mix of a commercial announcement and an artistic manifesto.34 This
text merits to be quoted at length, not only because it is an organic part of the work
itself, but also because it shows the penetration of a metamodern sensibility in an
artist’s metadiscursive reflexion about art in the digital century.
   Balloon Dog Deflated, Green writes, ‘was conceptually crafted with the same
principles of the original […]. Like Koons, Michael Green was the CEO of the
project, overlooking every detail without ever actually having to create the 3D

31
   It is worth noting that Sholim has been experimenting with transforming his GIFs into sound
minimovies of just one minute. GIFs thus become extraordinarily suggestive moving tableaux
accompanied by a sound environment that makes them even more expressive. See <http://coub.
com/milosrajkovic> [accessed 20 March 2016].
32
   See Michael Green’s official website <http://officialmichaelgreen.com> [accessed 20 March
2016].
33
   Olivia B. Waxman, An Orange Balloon Dog Sold for $58.4M So Here Are 10 Other Cool Jeff Koons
Balloon Pieces, Time (14 November 2013) <http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/11/14/an-orange-
balloon-dog-sold-for-58-4-million-so-here-are-10-cool-jeff-koons-balloon-pieces/> [accessed 20
March 2016].
34
   The page is still available at <http://www.ebay.com/itm/Balloon-Dog-Deflated-GIF-file-by-Mi-
chael-Green-/321516528404> [accessed 20 March 2016].

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                                   Monica Dall’Asta


sculpture, or write code to produce the animation’. Green’s purely conceptual
work focuses on deflation, situating itself in the historical place ‘where it is once
again time to destroy the values of the tradition of modern art’, since ‘modern art
has exhausted its own frame with postmodern maximalist expression of all that
was left’. Today ‘physical museums, like compact discs and books are dead’ and ‘the
museum of 2014 is the internet’. In a typically modernist stance, Green affirms the
need ‘for our culture to evolve to the logical next step, the digital medium’. This
turn is anticipated by ‘a young generation of artists [who] have found inspiration
from new tools that represent their time on earth’. But the disenchantment with
both the modern and the postmodern versions of euphoria keeps assailing these
avant-garde practitioners with the awareness that they ‘will never have a name like
Jeff Koons did 20 years ago, because culture has divorced itself from relating to
the concept and value of a painting. It’s over. The deflation of “Balloon Dog De-
flation” represents this death, letting go of all the optimism Koons blew into it 20
years ago’. In a truly metamodern, oscillating attitude, though, the end of art is de-
scribed as an eternal, recursive ending, one that allows for the serial reappearance
of the new: ‘Innovation is taking place in this medium’, because ‘It’s over and it
begins again...’. Consequently, purchasing Green’s GIF means ‘to be making his-
tory’, to give ‘artists around the world an opportunity to MAKE A LIVING from
their own work. Today’s best artists are on the internet and they do it for free. Jeff
Koons is dead. If he was alive today, and made a ‘balloon dog deflated’, he would
be as poor as Michael Green’. Green’s denunciation of the living conditions of
contemporary digital artists acknowledges that ‘it is difficult for artists who make
digital work to gain any capital from it, because the work is all in the hyperreal.
Where is the object physically? No such object exists’. Finally, the aim of his piece
of conceptual net art is ‘to open up a discussion on how digital art jpegs/GIFs/etc.
could be sold and collected, just like how paintings are currently auctioned’, so
as to allow ‘Michael Green and his contemporaries [to] support their lifestyle by
selling their work to the public’. That Green’s GIF was finally sold for just $200 is
a gloomy commentary to his artist’s intervention.
   Selling a GIF on eBay is no doubt a perfect allegory for the destiny of art in the
post-postmodern age of digital reproduction. The story of Balloon Dog Deflated
reflects a more general ‘structure of feelings’ that can be said metamodern insofar
as it effectively positions itself beyond the end of the end of history (and art), but
only to discover that history is just the experience of a present that does not end.
Yet this permanent feeling of historical loss is viewed as the condition for the birth
of something new, an ‘impossible possibility’ that it still worth to pursue beyond
any rational calculation. In their permanent state of suspension between stillness
and motion, GIFs are graphic expressions of the metamodern urge to reveal the
looping horizon that history has become for us contemporaries.




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