How GIF Trash Became Internet Culture Glue & GIFability: Interesting Ideas

After reading both articles I think I’m starting to see why something as mundane and as commonplace as GIFs (Or so I thought) are our first focus in Foundations to 4d, a medium that relishes in playing around with concepts of time and space, while also enjoying a more accepting role for new mediums and channels. The GIF perfectly reflects a rapidly changing cultural landscape, our largely diminished attention spans, and an embrace of meme-culture in both the extremes; the aloof other-worldliness of high fashion, to the disposable cheap macros that have become our cultural rosetta-stone for all internet communication. By their very nature GIFs capture a very select moment in time, a select feeling. Effective GIFs will endear for as long as there are people who resonate with the image, bad GIFs will be regulated to the forever-burning trashfires of failed internet momentum. If you consider each frame of a GIF to be a scene and the movement to the next, a cut. We should not waste another second turning our nose up at the creators who funnel their energies into what some might view as lesser art forms, or risk making hypocrites of ourselves for stodgy and archaic vestiges of bourgeois elitism. I think it’s interesting how the acceptance of GIFs in the larger cultural landscape as a medium feels so disconnected to the cutting edge of what artist and visionaries are doing now, and much like how the comic book enjoyed a representative transformation to “graphic novel.” I’d like to see something similar for this budding art form.