Art Galleries Embrace Animated GIFs

Art Galleries Embrace Animated GIFs, Animated GIFs may be the latest way to crack a joke, but at one London exhibit, they’re also an art form.

Born in 1987: The Animated GIF, a recently launched project at The Photographers’ Gallery, features more than 40 animated GIFs created by artists of various disciplines — many of whom were working with the medium for the first time.

The gallery has dedicated a garage-door-size screen to the digital creations, which include a woman in a sarong twirling a hoola-hoop, a shifting block of squares and a landscape with three trees that subtly sway with the wind.

“In a world where most Digital SLR cameras can shoot high definition video, digital technology raises questions concerning what a photograph is and how we make sense of it,” said Katrina Sluis, the curator of a digital series that begins with the animated GIF exhibit, in a statement. “Our opening show embraces the animated GIF as a uniquely screen-based image.”

In this GIF by Seán Hillen, a woman raises a cigarette to her mouth. See more here.

As the title of the exhibit suggests, animated GIFs were introduced in 1987. Recognizing the portable color image files as a medium for artwork, however, is a practice that has only recently surfaced.

The curator of another aniamted GIF gallery at Denison University, Paddy Johnson, put the appeal of animated GIFs as art like this:

“They attract attention. They flicker and undulate. They stutter. Graphics Interchange Format (GIF unabbreviated) surveys a small subsection of fine art workers within this growing culture of image-makers.”

Some brick-and-mortar galleries have pulled animated GIF exhibits directly from the Internet.

The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, for instance, recently created an animated GIF exhibit called “Who Tripped El Hadji Diouf” from an online forum in which participants manipulated the image of the Scottish soccer star being “clattered.”

Sluis’s exhibit focuses on animated GIFs created specifically for the gallery, but it has integrated this open-submission spirit of the Internet.