general

Ryder Ripps and others talk about collaborative culture online: [YouTube]

Almost ten years ago your humble narrator was talking up group participation "meme" databases and how they existed in a parallel universe from official net art culture. Glad to see PBS is waking up to this idea. Back then it was "the tourist guy" and now it is "strutting Leo" and the mixing is more accelerated but same concept.

PBS's understanding is a trifle shallow, though. These aren't art critics being interviewed but mostly Net Culture Analysts (Ripps is one of the few artists): for this type of pundit there is no art, no visual history to push against, only a cr-aa-azy world of remixes that anyone can do.

Connor is working on a dissertation on Animated GIFs and Web Culture and sent the questions below. With his permission I'm posting them in interview form.

What first inspired you to make web animations, did you experiment with Quicktime or Flash before choosing GIF?

I never used Flash or Quicktime. My first GIFs were at the end of '03. Oddly enough I made them because my digital camera, a Sony, had a feature called "Clip Motion" where you could take stills and export them from the camera as an animated sequence in GIF format. I made some stop motion animations of the molecular imagery I was working with at the time. After that I downloaded a simple GIF-creating program and started making them outside the camera, using my own drawings.

The GIF format allows you to set the number of repetitions when exporting an animation; Why choose to make work which loops endlessly?

Once the GIF "dies" after its allotted repetitions, simply refreshing your browser won't reactivate it. You have to clear your cache and restart the browser, which is annoying.

Are you making animations with the intent/desire that they will be shared/displayed beyond your own website? Do you care about, or make efforts to investigate what happens to them after they are initially put online?

I wouldn't be too happy if I saw a GIF of mine used in someone else's money-making project such as an advertisement or music video. So far that hasn't happened. Mostly the GIFs are recycled and passed around by other artists or appear on people's social media pages, or are used as visual confections on bulletin boards. My only "effort to investigate" is if my stats show a GIF being hotlinked elsewhere (that is, loading directly from my domain without first being saved to someone's site) I might follow the link to see how it's being used. If the traffic is too egregious, bandwidth-wise, I can change the URL but usually the hits die down after a few days. I did a project where I screenshotted people's uses of my "OptiDisc" GIF and I made an installation piece with the screenshots: http://www.tommoody.us/panel-notes/ (scroll down)

In recent years there have been a number of gallery exhibitions showcasing GIF animations (including your own work); Generally, What do you see as the successes and failures of these varying attempts? Is something lost by projecting a GIF or by transferring to DVD for display?

My first efforts to show GIFs in a gallery were in '05 and '06 - shows in New York and elsewhere. I did a solo show in Brooklyn called "Room Sized Animated GIFs" in '06. Since GIFs are native to browsers and the internet it is always a translation exercise to show them in a public, physical space context. Every incarnation of the GIF, every set of viewing circumstances, is unique. I have done everything from convert them to DVD, arrange multiple GIFs on an HTML page, show them on monitors, show them projected... Each is a unique artwork and retains as much or little of the GIFness of the GIF (its "essential" features such as low frame rate, reduced color, etc) as you need to make a successful work. The GIF could be the art or it could just be a component of the art. This week I have been working on a piece where the GIF is converted to DVD and shown on a cathode ray tube TV. It still reads as a GIF but is clearly a bastardized hybrid of semi-obsolete media.

You were critical of actions by Lauren Cornell (representing artist Sara Ludy) to take GIF animations offline to sell to collectors. Does commodifying GIF artworks mean betraying the ‘open source’ nature of the format? Can GIF artists make money and continue to share their work online?

I wasn't the only person who raised an eyebrow about this but I was pretty vocal. The artist, Sara Ludy, says she takes work on and offline as part of her practice but it's unclear whether the sale in question, at the Armory art fair, was to "lock up the rights" to a filetype that might otherwise be open source. Cornell hasn't clarified what she meant by the phrase "we're taking the work offline so the collector can have it locally." Artists can do whatever they want to do with their work, contract-wise. What was surprising was hearing this from an Internet Art website that has traditionally been a haven for hacker types.*
I have sold work to collectors that first appeared on the internet, including GIFs. In the case of the GIF sales, the collector didn't buy the GIF file per se but rather a DVD edition with a certificate from me as to the size and authenticity of the edition. The GIF in question may still be blinking and pulsing away on the internet and the collector has an authenticated version. This may or may not have been resized or transcoded or have otherwise received my personal, hands-on attention. It ultimately doesn't matter--it's whether the piece is any good and worth owning and whether I'm worth supporting economically, ha ha.

Lastly, do you have a favourite GIF animation or one which is particularly memorable?

No one GIF, but you can see the work I have made and collected on my website(s).

Previous animated GIF Q and A

*Rhizome.org, where Cornell is executive director. The GIF sale in question was likely an institutional fundraiser and Ludy isn't "represented" by Rhizome or Cornell in the traditional sense. --TM

Speaking of working with Google to keep Google hacks online, here are two artists announcing the problems they've had in working with the forces of darkness:

Cory Arcangel: Doogle "Canned". This is the exact scenario described by Ben Fino-Radin in his paper [PDF] about net art preservation. An artist's "Google hack" breaks as Google changes its code, in this case Arcangel's search engine that only searched for Doogie Howser: "Google depreciated the second API it ran on – which allowed it to pull live search results for Neil Patrick Harris – so I have decided to retire it from pulling LIVE search links." Props to Arcangel for letting an artwork die rather than sticking tubes and electrodes into it, I guess.

Paul Slocum: The Difficulty of Developing on iPhone 2G/3G without Service. Slocum needs to test an art app on various phones and "Apple won’t let me use the rather expensive little computer that I bought unless I pay for AT&T service that I don’t need." You can read his solutions at the link. My solution would be to keep "art" and "Apple" separate but then I am only steps away from Walden Pond.

The following are some additional responses to Ben Fino-Radin's post and paper [PDF] about the preservation of works in the Rhizome.org ArtBase.

1. Something to consider: A digital work that breaks and has to be remade is a new work. Should it it be re-evaluated at the time it is redone?

2. In the 1950s Giorgio de Chirico remade (forged) his own paintings from the Scuola Metafisica period of the 1910s. These latecomers may or may not be identical, and certainly had the artists' imprimatur, but critics (and the market) will treat them differently than the originals. The artist has changed, the context changes, materials change. Why should a Golan Levin "applet" piece, with four layers of code identified by Fino-Radin as being susceptible to breakage and rewriting, be treated as the "same" piece once it's eventually "reinterpreted" in a museum archive?

3. An institutional database of digital works could be a dynamic entity adding and shedding content or it could be the fetishization of a fixed series of moments. Fino-Radin never questions that his job as a scholar is to implement the latter scheme.

4. Something else to consider: The life of a digital work is not in its centralized preservation but in its widest possible distribution (and ideally, evaluation). It is a very different creature from a painting.

5. Four papers have been written on the preservation of the Rhizome ArtBase from 2002-2011, according to Ben Fino-Radin (including his). Much of this content seems to be speculative suggestions for how to fix work rather than actual success stories. For example, maybe in the future Rhizome could partner with Google so that every time Google changes its code, they will notify Rhizome so that artist "hacks" of Google can be kept from breaking. Sorry, this smells funny. In any case, where does the time and labor come from to implement such schemes? Best to keep writing papers.

6. Institutional archives could be periodically just be cleaned of broken work, freeing up disc space. Natural selection: there are a zillion digital works; the ones that break live in our collective memory but will not be kept on life support.

7. The wording of the post title for Fino-Radin's article, "Keeping It Online," came on the heels of Rhizome receiving some flak for selling an animated GIF at the Armory art fair with the statement that they were "taking [it] offline so the collector can have it locally." Not a very open source sentiment but as far as we know the practice is still going on. It is good to know that the organization is otherwise committed to keeping work online, even if it is reconstituted, zombie artwork.

previous thoughts on this topic

Over at Rhizome.org, Ben Fino-Radin poses some questions about two works of internet art but doesn't answer them (at least in the same blog post). Let's see if we can do it.

Q. Were Globalmove.us [JODI's elaborate patterns of animated icons floating over actual Google Maps - ed.] to be preserved by a collecting institution, how would one ensure that changes made by Google to their Maps API does not destroy the functions implemented by the artist's code?

A. One couldn't.

Q. In the instance of a work such as Joel Holmberg's Legendary Account [a performance piece where Holmberg asked faux-ingenuous, troll-y type questions on Yahoo! Answers -ed.], what is to be preserved? Is the context of the Yahoo! Answers platform vital to one's encounter?

A. Yes.

Q. When exhibited as part of the New Museum's "Free" exhibition, the work was displayed as printouts of screenshots, and as well, the work exists as highly compressed screenshots on the artist's website. Do these forms of documentation suffice?

A. No.

Q. Is this experiment in internet phenomenology best encountered naïvely in its natural setting?

A. Yes.

Fino-Radin has also written a paper on archival preservation of works in the ArtBase [PDF] where he does actually answer these questions, somewhat differently than above. His conclusion about JODI is more or less the same as here: the piece is fuX0red as soon as Google changes some basic code--and they change it all the time. With the Holmberg piece he believes the screenshots-on-an-HTML-page documentation is adequate.

One wonders, though, why these two works are given such prominent attention since neither is in the Rhizome ArtBase. Fino-Radin uses four artworks as test cases in his paper: Globalmove.us, Legendary Account, and two from the ArtBase: Paul Slocum's Dot Matrix Printer (not a piece of internet art by any means) and a Golan Levin applet-based work called Floccus. Let's reiterate: half of the primary examples considered by Fino-Radin aren't in the collection he is writing about! A screenshot of the JODI piece is even used as the cover image of his paper, and in the Rhizome post.

Not only are the two pieces not in Rhizome's collection, neither JODI nor Holmberg has work in the collection. Is all this institutional attention a bid to bring them in? In any case, what does it say about the quality of the ArtBase that examples must be drawn from elsewhere? There's not enough good, soon-to-be-obsolescent work to consider? One thing I never knew about the ArtBase is that it's completely vetted by the Rhizome staff. I was always under the mistaken impression it was democratic, a la the artist slide registries maintained by certain alternative spaces. On page 14 of his paper, Fino-Radin says that any artist may submit to the Rhizome ArtBase "for consideration of inclusion" and that works considered "of great importance" are also actively sought.

I recommend reading Fino-Radin's paper but to me its primary purpose is to "narrativize" the four artworks under review. Almost none of them can actually be preserved on the internet in anything like their original form so we have Fino-Radin's writing as some of their most thorough documentation.

(And not that it matters but yrs truly took the uncredited photo of the Slocum printer piece used in the PDF.)