Did you ever wonder what happened to all the gif animations that sparkled in the dawn of the internet? According to artists Greg Niemeyer and Olya Dubatova, they have become part of the digital subconscious, and BAMPFA is presenting what that might look like in an exhibit called gifCollider.

In October 2016, BAMPFA invited the public to ponder these questions as thousands of gif animations will emerge and collide on the public outdoor screen in a ballet of memory and erasure. Call it an “outstallation”. The gifs were presented in 10 chapters, playing for 30 minutes on every hour.

Léa Perraudin, a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Center for New Media, proposes that gifCollider is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call stratification. She sees gifCollider as an archive in a transgressed state, where the GIF images condense into a digital sediment. The digital sedimnet consists of fading traces of images. The fact that the images fade rematerializes them into something other than an abstraction and evoke the physical effort of maintaining any information. The material sediment is a structure upon which future emanations of information technology and social media are erected. Her full essay is linked here.

FROM SOCIAL MEDIA