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Abstract
The most valuable gift you can give someone is attention. But does this same rule apply to the nonstop demand for attention marshalled through Internet technologies? Driven by an insatiable appetite for profit, scientific research in compression techniques are used to reduce data and economize signals to questionable extremes. Given this awareness, does one comply, paying attention to the point of exhaustion, offering endless hours of eyeball attention re-tweeting, re-blogging, and ‘liking’ so someone else may reap profit, or does one tweak the circuit and rewire the rules of the game? A number of contemporary artists have gravitated to the latter, reconfiguring otherwise functional Internet tools and interfaces into error-laden ‘glitch art’ and animated Graphic Interchange Format (GIFs). While these new glitch genres appear to offer nothing but meaningless fragments of polychromatic noise, they do in fact raise valuable questions regarding the material and economic logic of the Internet, normatively concealed from end users. I argue that certain uses of animated GIFs and glitch art offer an emergent visual rhetoric of anti-communication that marks, echoes, and offsets the progressive rationalization of aesthetics in modern culture and media.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Myriam Couturier for her help with this article.
Notes
1. Crary, 24/7, 39.
2. Also, see the work of Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention.
3. By invoking the term ‘economic’ I denote only a casual sense of getting the most ‘bang for one's buck,’ the most sensible, practical and efficient way of doing something. In other words, I do not mean the political economy of networks or Marxist interpretations of digital media art.
4. The terms digital media and new media are used interchangeably. For more on this see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media.
5. (The flip side of course is that as things get smaller with less information, higher demands are placed on human attention and optical labour, hence my clinging of the phrase, Eyeballed Aesthetics).
6. This fusion between the economic logic of digital media and digital culture is illustrated in the phenomena of Gif-iti’s, analysed in a more extended version of this article.
7. Cubitt, “Codecs,” 47.
8. The International Organization for Standardization is an international standard-setting body for the Internet.
9. Cubitt, “Codecs,” 45–46.
10. Cubitt, “Codecs,” 45–46.
11. Sterne, MP3.
12. Sterne, MP3, 3, 22, 88. Also see the work of Mara Mills.
13. This history is charted in detail in chapter 5 of Chromatic Algorithms, some blue screen technology thin-film, to early frame buffers, offer channels, and masking techniques in off-the-shelf software.
14. For more on the technical theories of predictive masking and critical bands see Wegel and Lane, Pohlmann, and Sterne.
15. Shannon and Weaver, Mathematical Theory, 9–10, 31; Shannon, “A Symbolic Analysis,” 744.
16. Noise may be unwanted additions maybe distortions of sound (in telephony, for example) or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy or facsimile), etc. All these changes in the transmitted signal are called noise. Weaver.
17. Sterne, MP3, 19, 51–52.
18. Shannon, “Information Theory,” 216.
19. Cubitt, “Codecs,” 49.
20. Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 2; Sterne, MP3, 53. Similar processes are referred to by Mara Mills as the ‘ergonomopolitics of objects,’ or by Foucault as ‘biopolitics.’
21. One key difference is that users (participants/consumers) today are often voluntarily labourers. For more on this see below or the work of Tizianna Terranova.
22. For instance the numerous Repetitive Strain Injuries associated with computer use or, for stress related issues, see Volpi, “Heavy Technology”; Kweon et al.
23. For example the comparison between American artist Jackson Pollock's paintings from the late 1940s and contemporary Japanese glitch artist Yoshi Sodeoka’s series of digital paintings, Pollock GIF Numbers 90–99 (2013) turns on rapid and radical compression of digital media to render the importance of detail and subtle line in the original Pollocks. [http://www.sodeoka.com/Pollock-GIF-Number-90-99].
24. Jenkins, “Convergence,” 24.
25. Crary, 24/7, 76.
26. One may propose counter examples of Snowdon’s newly proposed phone cover device that monitors when data is being passively collected or the iPhones ‘secret’ location tracking function, but these techniques also rely on previous engagement, movement, or settings on the part of the owner/ user. I thank the reviews at Communication Design for pointing this out.
27. I wish to thank Lisa Nakamura and Alex Galloway for first pointing this out.
28. Mackenzie, Cutting Code, 188.
29. Many animated GIFs also bear a strong communicative function.
30. This frame delay attribute is also why scholars have since remarked on the GIF’s phenomenological association with protocinematic technologies from the nineteenth century, including such optical devices and toys as the phenakistoscopes (1832), zoetropes (1834), or praxinoscopes (1877). Eppink, “A Brief History,” 300.
31. If using a slow connection, unavoidable in the early years of the Internet, one would encounter additional staggering in downloading these files.
32. Featuring work by relatively well-known and already established net artists including Cory Arcangel, Peter Baldes, Michael Bell-Smith, Jimpunk, Olia Lialina, Abe Linkoln, Guthrie Lonergan, Lovid, Tom Moody, Paper Rad, Paul Slocum, and Matt Smear (aka 893/umeancompetitor).
33. Surf clubs are group blogs that focused on decontextualizing found digital objects. In a surf club, anonymous users (or artists like Internet artist Petra Cortright, who notoriously championed the ‘Computers Club’ surf club One user would post an animated GIF of a politician doing something funny, to which another user with first on one's with a related graphic, or alternatively, take the discussion in another direction altogether. http://www.computersclub.org/club/
34. His official website that recorded more than 15 million visitors in 2011. www.newrafael.com
35. One may find hundreds of counter-examples, namely cinemagraph GIFs where a slow frame rate and number of selected frames used begins to resemble mini narrative films (Twitter’s Vine would be affiliated with this genre).
36. Moody, OptiDisc; Sodeoka “Art & Music.”
37. The Kunstverein Arnsberg-commissioned “Violent Power,” can be found at www.violentpower.com
38. Reference redacted for purposes of blind review. See Kane, “Glitch Art: Failure from The Avant-Garde to Kanye West.”
39. See http://cinemagraphs.com/
40. As Shari Wolk notes, the tendency to focus on moments of batting eyelashes, or small gestures his revealing insofar as the format allows users and viewers and creators to remain within a perpetually deferred presence of non-time time and non-space space.
41. For example, many cinemagraphs consist of such mundane events as animations of a swinging microphone, a head turning, or an eyelash batting, while the rest of the high-gloss fashion image remains intact
42. See Manovich, Language. These principles have received such pervasive coverage and attention in new media scholarship over the last 15 years, there is no need to rehearse them here.
43. The title, Menkman explains, is a reference to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, in which Haraway writes, ‘Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum …’ Haraway, 153.
44. For example Jon Cates now closely emulates this look on his ‘home page.’
45. I wish to thank Jonathan Sterne for discussing this with me.
46. Menkman, The moment(um), 4.
47. Deleuze, ‘Postscript.’.
48. Crary, 24/7, 8, 44 and Boltanski and Chiapello: ‘to always be doing something, to move to change – this is what enjoys prestige, as against stability, which is often synonymous with inaction.’ The New Spirit, 155.
49. In the case of traditional television, this is the endless stop-and-flow rhythm of artifice and superfluous data, in the case of the animated GIF, and by extension a majority of glitch art, it is the perpetual deferment of an unlived present. Vivian Sobchack has argued similarly, albeit in regards to the QuickTime format in 1999, that its then-slow frame rate left spaces and gaps that never resolved into finite action or cathartic ‘emotion.’ Sobchack, ‘Nostalgia,’ 12.