general

Will has changed his mind about whether the mix is more important than the motion in the strange saga of animated GIFs as artistic expression. He now agrees that "The Art Happens Here" graphic from 1997 (indicating the network space among computers as the locus for "the art") has dated badly and probably shouldn't be used to symbolize the rather more sophisticated things people are doing with GIFs these days (and no, we're not talking about cinemagraphs).

Oh, whoops, I don't think he said any of that--so why is he saying I'm publicly agreeing with him?

...from my twitter archive in HTML (manually updated every six months or so):

"in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people" - momus 4:08 PM Dec 21st, 2009

wouldn't know shitake from shinola 9:29 PM Dec 16th, 2009

"Lovecraft is like totally bananas hahaha I mean wow. This one hell it was just strait up nuts, freaky low quality goodness hahaha." 1:45 AM Dec 10th, 2009

both neko case and mark mothersbaugh picked "A Face in the Crowd" for TCM 12:32 AM Dec 9th, 2009

headline from comcast web portal: "Authorities say man stabbed 2 Army buddies to death" (can a murder victim still be a buddy?) 5:56 PM Dec 4th, 2009

track 10 on Tony Thorpe's Electric Kingdom electro comp. is Lory D, Bitter End 1, not Synapse (discogs notes the error on the CD) 1:04 AM Dec 4th, 2009

3 books on the way: Paglia's The Birds, Ethan Frome, and the first Earthsea novel (never read those Le Guins) 12:24 AM Dec 4th, 2009

reading Richard Ford's 3rd Bascombe book - I kind of hate it but the obsessive detail makes it hard to ignore 12:19 AM Dec 4th, 2009

"this book is bad" "well, you're bad" (criticism in the happy talk days of 2009) 7:38 PM Dec 3rd, 2009

the search function here is so lousy I'm saving my twits to a private blog page (these are supposed to be notes I can use) 10:15 AM Dec 3rd, 2009

sliced actual '70s breakbeat 10:12 AM Dec 3rd, 2009

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.)

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)

"He is subverting and perverting scores of impressionable minds but we can't make a case against him."
"Are you tracking his movements?"
"Yes, we got his GPS data from the mobile providers but he doesn't seem to ever go anywhere."

hat tip hypothete and fritz lang