While most GIF makers do not identify as choreographers, filmmakers or even artists, the animated GIF holds interesting implications for the field of screendance, drawing on various currents in its recent scholarship. The GIF’s starting point is scarecly detectable due to the strobe flash lighting. In approaching GIFs as moving images that highlight kinesthetic possibilities, screendance artists and scholars should note the GIF’s capacity to form new micro compositions that become re-contextualized within a format that dictates specific movement and temporal qualities, further outlined below.Ī steady stream of unending doppelgängers sourced from David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS. This dichotomy is a familiar one to screendance artists and scholars who are frequently confronted with the task of positioning themselves regarding how they define dance or the choreographic. Screendance artists – dancers Laura Ríos and Ximena Monroy, videomaker Alfredo Salomón- experimented with making GIFs during the Residency Hybrid Communities in Mexico, hosted by Festival Agite y Sirva: Although some GIFs feature recognizable styles of dance (there is even an entire gallery dedicated to “dance GIFs” on the website GIPHY), the majority of GIFs are sourced from pre-existing narrative film or television sequences that have been mined for gestural and kinetic material outside the realm of what is commonly labeled “dance”. Like screendance, the multilayered nature of an animated GIF draws on diverse forms of film, photography, graphic design, technology, and choreography, among others, and varies widely according to the individual GIF in question.
Indeed, approaching animated GIFs as works of screendance has been a natural response throughout my own exposure to this newly popularized image format, which is not surprising given that animated GIFs are characterized by their movement qualities. The prominence of animated GIFs online has led me to ponder how screendance scholarship may contribute to understanding the art of the GIF, and reciprocally how these moving images might nourish current dialogues within the screendance community.
Reading GIFs as Screendance, or a Screendance Subgenre? Far from exhaustive, my response to the rise of the animated GIF is an informal invitation to consider new forms of moving images and where they sit within the realm of screendance. To my knowledge, animated GIFs have not yet been the subject of in depth exploration within the scope of visual studies or screendance, often limited to short articles in technology publications, though this will likely change within the near future. Populating a wide range of online locations, animated GIFs are currently thriving on social media, while web platforms dedicated to facilitating their creation and providing electronic viewing galleries are also abundant (2). GIFs play on an endless loop, which results in a hypnotic quality that frequently renders it difficult to identify a linear progression of where their movements begin and end.
Occasionally, still images, including photographs, paintings, and screengrabs are also used as source material for GIFs that undergo a transition to become moving images through layers of added motion via animation techniques. These silent moving images are composed of brief motion sequences referred to as “loops”, most often excerpted from classic cinema or popular culture, although original creations and home videos are common as well. Most Internet users are aware of the recent rise of the animated GIF, an acronym that stands for “Graphics Interchange Format” (1).
0 kommentar(er)
