tom moody

Had a friendly argument recently over whether Vvork.com is a "trending" website. I say no, unless it's the single trend of the persistence of certain art conventions (all-white rooms, photo-documentation, theory references) in the face of changes in the world and the Internet.

As previously discussed, several recent articles have suggested a trend in the use of animated GIFs, by artists and those professionally unburdened by "art," yet you basically never see GIFs on Vvork. Lots of YouTubes yes, because they are a way to transmit video art. But GIFs are flashy and blingy and fun and too many of them would upset the site's core principles of austerity, high seriousness, and respect for institutional authority. That is to say, its enduring monotrend.

Update: jmb notes that vvork has animated GIFs. A page and a half out of hundreds, consider me unimpressed. Actually less than that, because about half the GIFs on those pages don't move. [Minor edits to the post to remove absolutes.]

Update 2: Assuming the search terms are reliable I count 14 posts with moving GIFs out of 4400 posts. A few stills from/links to animated GIFs can be found, so much more "documentary."

Update 3: What set me off (among other things): Ryder Ripps has been doing great GIF work (page back from here for some recent examples), some using FX plugins as a kind of default, others just smart mixing and matching, so of course vvork.com blogs his international collection of facebook songs on youtube. Nothing against that collection, but it's such a predictable choice from them. YouTube collections will always be hot with a certain Net Art curating set; GIFs are harder to get a bead on. Just please don't tell me Vvork is a trend website: somehow they manage to make 4000 artists seem like they're all in the same group.

Update 4: Have been a proud Vvork complainer since Spring 2007; the nature of the griping changes but curiously, the site never does.

Update 5: Changed "never" to "rarely" and then to "basically never." Apologies for the vacillation; am trying to find the right balance between truth and nitpicking.

Four recent "mainstream" articles suggest an upward trend in the use of animated GIFs: Slate, Jezebel, Vice's Motherboard site, and Dazed and Confused, the last of which covers the topic in its December print issue, with the caption "Meet the techno freak kids employing an outdated animation technique to create radical future forms." That's pretty accurate except for the "outdated" part (minor quibble). The journalistic hook in all these articles is that GIFs became discredited and replaced by Flash and now they're back. That's not really true but is more dramatic than saying GIFs never went away, either as web design elements or on popular meme sites such as 4chan and YTMND, staying strong all through the 2000s. What did happen is that companies like Apple, Google and Facebook minimized GIF support (or never had it to begin with), so it seems like GIFs passed out of view to someone who uses only those products.

Update: One small correction so the post makes, um, more sense.