The introduction of new media marked the end of an era in which cultural objects could be interpreted as finished and sequential works of art, or as cultural theorist Lev Manovich (2001) notes, new media is not “something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions (p. 36)”. As a result of this transformation, Manovich famously (and quite provocatively) predicted a replacement of the narrative genre with the database genre as the most important cultural form of our time. In his work, he develops an aesthetic for new media by connecting the history of media to the database’s unique possibilities to generate, organize, manipulate and distribute data. The GIF, I argue, embodies both a reflection and an evolution of Manovich’s ideas. Leaning on a non-linear and non-hierarchical structure, the GIF found a way to survive in an era in which the narrative slowly makes way for the database. As outlined in the second edition of The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2002), a narrative should, in its bare medium, “represent an event or a series of events (Abbott, p. 13).” While some GIFs do show us minimal events or even a series of events, most of them show instances rather than stories; independent scraps of larger narratives that repetitively move in circles. GIFs are always in motion, not only inside their own loops but also in the space they live in: the database. They are influenced by this context that is ever-changing while circulating in alternating constellations through the evolving space we call the Internet. These constellations ask for modes of interpretation that not only consider the complex time-based dimension of the GIF (the loop), but also its spatial construction of meaning (interaction with other images/texts).

While the GIF is a relatively new format, its current form re-imagines and reframes two proto-cinematic techniques: the loop and spatial montage. Manovich pointed at the potential of these enduring techniques in an age in which the importance of narrative diminishes. While both have been in existence for centuries, I will examine them in relation to the context that re-empowered their existence: the database. In the first part of this essay, I will (both literally and figuratively) dive into the database, in order to outline its growing importance as a cultural metaphor in the age of information overload. Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001) will be my guide in doing so. In the second part of the essay, I will unravel the minimalistic architecture of the GIF (the loop) and the ways it constructs meaning inside different databases (spatial montage). This way, I will show the complexity of the seemingly rudimental format and the ways it has adapted itself to the database it lives in, as a pioneer of a larger cultural shift. The GIF, as I argue, is the embodiment of the new possibilities that Manovich outlined, pointing at an exciting and sustainable future for the moving image in a database culture.

Information highway, cyberspace, global village, tidal wave, infinite cloud, or simply the ocean: the complex information network we call the Internet is given many metaphors over the years. Oxford Dictionary defines it as: “a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities, consisting of interconnected networks using standardized communication protocols” (2017). It gives us a rather technical definition that emphasizes the functional base of the network, while its metaphors seem to grasp the spatial dimension and the massive distances among the Net’s nodes. Like a rhizome, the Internet is positioned in the middle, “between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 25). It neither has an end nor a beginning and its form is liquid. As the introduction of the intriguing bundle The Internet Does Not Exist (2015) outlines: “Networks are all edges (…) We thought there were windows but actually they’re mirrors” (p. 5). While we try to draw maps of the web from an overview perspective, these remain representations of an undefined territory (p. 49). The web is always in process, as its materials are constantly added, modified, updated or erased. Marked by an endless connectedness, the movements among interfaces and databases produce an infinite web of information that surrounds our daily life; it is part of our consciousness.

While the unfathomable, all-encompassing and evolving space described above seems to far exceed any type of methodological organization, we cannot examine the GIF without exploring its surroundings. Wandering around like a traveller in the digital world, the meaning of the GIF is defined by its ever-changing contexts and users. This rotation of signs asks for a semiotic process that is not only based on the GIF as medium/image, but one that changes with its rhythm: we have to follow its movements through the unstable space we call the Internet. To prevent myself from getting lost while doing so, I imagine the web as a kaleidoscope, a chromatic meme wheel where GIFs come into focus and then blur into obscurity, over and over again. This essay explores the spinning of that wheel and, by acknowledging that velocity, intensity, and spread are characteristics that are inextricably linked to the GIF, it is primarily based on snapshots of the ‘front-end’, on the surface where the GIF moves from one place to another while being stuck in the same short loop. While the codes that float underneath the GIF navigate it through the web (and therefore decide when and in what form we see it), I am unable to decode this computer programming language. Instead of going into the ‘deep’ web, I will therefore examine the GIF on the surface, where it is disguised in a visual appearance that I can read and understand.

O pening the homepage of the GIF database GIPHY, I see Beyoncé cheering at an awards show next to a dancing skeleton cartoon and a monkey throwing away a laptop next to a bored-looking politician. While I recognize the form and content of these various images, I do not engage with the data that flows underneath them. As Manovich summarizes: “the visual culture of a computer age is cinematographic in its appearance, digital on the level of its material, and computational (i.e. software driven) in its logic” (2001, p. 180). While GIFs appear to me as moving images, they are actually based on invisible digital codes, and therefore characterized by an endless modularity and variability. The GIF has two identities, as Manovich explains, one satisfies the demands of human communication (e.g. the cinematographic appearance) another makes it suitable for computer-based practices of production and distribution (e.g. the invisible codes) (2001). The interface given to my senses is nothing but an unanticipated, momentary form. “The interface is a fiction, a form that pretends that data can be held steady”, as Italian media theorist Vito Campanelli describes it (2010, p. 103). Binary codes are translated into moving images that allow me to process a reality that is otherwise too complex to understand. The interface shows me the ‘front-end’ of the data-wheel, before it turns away from my eyes again. Still, a part of me is always aware of the data behind the data, even though I cannot engage with it. While algorithms have selected the GIFs I see on my screen, the data that has not been highlighted is still close to the surface. I only have to click on the hash-tag that accompanies the GIF to open up a new screen that will show me hundreds of related ones.

While searching for the right GIF, my eyes constantly have to process a multitude of separate yet coexisting temporalities in just one glance: the wheel that spits up the GIFs keeps on turning and changing. Already in 2001, Beatrix Colomina pointed at this condition of attention and how it has become more and more habitual over the last decade:

We are surrounded today, everywhere, all the time, by arrays of multiple, simultaneous images (…) The idea of a single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate, as if we — all of us living in this new kind of space, the space of information — could be diagnosed en masse with attention deficit disorder. (2001, p. 7)

Kristin Veel explores in her article “Information Overload and Database Aesthetics” (2011) the popularity of the archive as a cultural metaphor that is able to manage the endless streams of digital images in this age of ‘information overload’. Rather than regarding the Internet as a fiction that completely resists inventory, she argues that it turns to a specific kind of inventory, i.e. that of the database. Recognizing that the archive is not a fixed object but a process (see: Derrida, 1995, p. 109), Veel points at the adaptive quality of the database and its preference for simultaneity over selection:

More than any form of organizational structure, the archive, in particular in the form of a database, contradicts the inclination to privilege one connection between two pieces of information over other possible connections, enabling multiple simultaneous constellations. (Veel, p. 308)

As a result, GIFs do not have a permanent place to be, hence their wandering character. In order to manage these homeless images, we need a system that considers all their possible meanings and connections, a system that is based on inclusion rather than exclusion. At the same time, however, these images need to be ‘findable’ by a user that wants to (temporally) adopt them. Information access is the new key category of our culture and, as Lev Manovich has argued, “we must deal with it theoretically, aesthetically, and symbolically” (2001, p. 217). A database like GIPHY is capable of fully adapting to, and anticipating, the constant state of distracted concentration in which we move through the digital age, by recognizing our ability to process different sets of images (and all their possible meanings) at once in a short amount of time. At the same time, this preference for simultaneity over selection meets the elusive character of the GIF, a format that does not even exists outside the database as a computer-based form. In other words, in order to see the GIF, we have to go through the database. Manovich extensively explored this metaphorical space in his famous work The Language of New Media (2001) and will therefore be my guide in exploring the space in which the GIF constructs meaning beyond linear narrative.

“After the novel, and subsequently cinema, privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate – the database” (Manovich, 2001, p. 218). With this sentence, Manovich opens its chapter on the database, exploring it as a form of cultural expression beyond its computer-based origin. Like literary or cinematic narrative, the database is capable of presenting a model of what the world is like, and in the age of information overload in which “the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database”, as Manovich argues (p. 219).

I n the most literal sense, the database is defined by Manovich as a structured collection of data “in which the user can perform various operations – view, navigate, search” (2001, p. 218). While GIPHY’s homepage overwhelms us with dozens of moving images (view), we can narrow down the input by clicking and scrolling through the different layers of the database (navigate). For more specific results, we can go through the numerous categories that the database offers us, like emotions, actions, TV-shows, celebrities, decades or interests (search). Since new GIFs can be added over time, a database like GIPHY is always in transition. This way, it contributes to the anti-narrative logic of the web and the new media objects it holds; it is always open and never ‘finished’. In Manovich’s definition, the database functions as a structured ‘list’ of separate yet relational elements, theoretically endless and always in progress. Its structure is non-hierarchical; items constantly affect and change each other’s meaning by interacting in ever-changing constellations. Its frame persists while its content evolves; its initial construction is built to host an ongoing process.

The GIF is a new media object that resembles the ‘endlessness’ of this process, while being a separate yet relational element in a structured collection. Like the database it lives in, the GIF lacks a beginning or end. It therefore refuses to serve as a fixed element in a larger development, making the necessity of a sequence redundant. Instead of asking for a linear imagination, it asks for a spatial imagination and, according to Manovich, it is because of this difference in imagination that the database can be seen as the ‘natural enemy’ of narrative: “As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events)” (Manovich, 2001, p. 225). Seeing them as competing imaginations, Manovich argues that database is the unmarked term in the digital age, dethroning narrative as the most important cultural metaphor of our time.

In order to understand this shift in a larger cultural realm, Manovich brings in the semiological theory of syntagm and paradigm that was originally formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure to apply to different sign systems (like narrative, but also food, fashion, etc.). This model divides each of these systems in two dimensions – the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic dimension. In language, for instance, we can discover the syntagmatic dimension in producing an utterance by the stringing together of elements, word after word, in a linear sequence. The paradigmatic dimension points at the set of related elements with which the chosen elements are associated; the language user selects each new element from a group of related elements. While this group of elements in the paradigmatic dimension are related in absentia, the chosen elements that form the syntagmatic dimension are related in praesentia (Manovich, 2001, p. 230). In other words, the group of choices from which the narrative is constructed is implicit (virtual paradigm), while the chosen narrative is explicit (actual syntagm). Manovich argues that new media reverse this relationship: the paradigm (the data) is given material existence, while the syntagm (the narrative) is dematerialised. “Paradigm is privileged, syntagm downplayed” (Manovich, 2001, p. 231). The database represents an actual given, while the narrative becomes a virtual possibility.

Manovich’s formulation captures the overall sense that the temporal ordering that is crucial for linear narrative is only virtually present in the database, whereas the spatial display of the data is actually present. This does not mean, however, that we are no longer in need of an interpreting human being that assigns meaning to this spatially presented data (and therefore, consequently, constructs a syntagm again). Manovich’s assertion points at a separation of objects (data) and the assigned meaning of these objects (narrative), while, in reality, they need each other in order to exist at all. GIFs live outside linear narratives, constantly moving around in changing spatial constructions: their meaning is highly variable since it depends on these evolving contexts. The GIF is not capable of interpreting itself: it needs a human being to position them in political discussions, personal conversations or online collections like Tumblr-pages, in which (temporal and multimedial) syntagms are explicitly constructed. Rather than seeing narrative and database as natural enemies, it can therefore give us more insights looking at them as natural symbionts¹, as Katherine Hayles suggests (2012, p. 176).

IIn her book How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), Hayles convincingly argues that Manovich’s division misses a symbiotic relationship that sustains both the narrative and the database form: “Because database can construct relational juxtapositions but is helpless to interpret or explain them, it needs narrative to make its results meaningful” (p. 176). Manovich’s theory of the database maps an unlived and static space, but as Hayles argues (and many others with her), this space only truly exists in theory. In Manovich’s definition of a database, data is presented as if they speak for themselves, though in fact they constantly beg for our interpretation and deconstruction. Even if narrative dissolves into database, as Manovich predicted, database demands narrative reappearance as soon as interpretation is required. As Sharon Daniel summarizes in “The Database: An Aesthetics of Dignity” (2007), “a database incorporates contradiction; it is simultaneously recombinant and indexical, precise and scalable, immersive and emergent, homogeneous and heterogeneous” (p. 150-151). Its aesthetic dimension therefore only arises when a user traverses this field of contradictions. Any meaning attached to the database requires the direct activity of combining the different elements, transforming the dead space of data into a lived space of meaning. Even if these combinations do not have a fixed form (like traditional narratives), they make the syntagmatic dimension explicit once again. If we want to interpret the GIF we have to consider this dimension, even if (at first sight) it seems to only exist in absentia.

Remarkably enough, Manovich did outline several techniques that could possibly combine the narrative imagination of creating a syntagm (and therefore meaning) with the spatial and non-linear character of the database. While the competition between narrative and database turns out to be more of a symbiosis, Manovich does recognize the importance of an active user in the construction of meaning in the digital age. He argues that new media follows, or runs ahead of, a post-industrial society, in which individual customization becomes more important than mass standardization (2001, p. 30). Manovich’s work therefore still provides us with a necessary framework while examining the animated GIF. In fact, behind his provocative claims lies the suggestion of combining the database form with a narrative imagination. In the last chapters of the book, he searches for an aesthetic of new media by looking at the history of visual culture and media, in particular, cinema. He states that, while dealing with the above outlined database/narrative problem, we can learn from cinema, as it “already exists right in the intersection between database and narrative” (2001, p. 237). Manovich outlines two cinema-related techniques that could be sources of possibilities for new media: the loop and spatial montage. Two possibilities which are, as I argue in the second part of this essay, re-born in the digital age in the form of the animated GIF, outlining a database future for moving images that exist outside narrative structures, but still need a human being with a narrative imagination to keep them alive and running.

AAs Manovich has argued, the connections between the GIFs in a database seem to, in the first place, only exist in absentia. The ‘author’ of the GIF – who stays anonymous, in most cases – seems to have no control over the semantics of the GIF and its connections with other elements. The user has the possibility (and therefore the ability) to interact with them in numerous ways. As outlined in the first part of this essay, the database refuses to order the list of elements in a sequential form. The user is therefore in need of a spatial imagination, in order to make sense of all the different elements and their possible connections. Looking at GIPHY, we see hundreds of loops that are locked in small, rectangular frames of different sizes. None of these frames is superior, nor are they ‘hard-wired’ by an editor in one possible sequence; they appear in different, ever-changing constellations to our eyes. This database form asks for a mode of interpretation that Manovich called ‘spatial montage’, which involves “a number of images, potentially of different sizes and proportions, all appearing on the screen at the same time” (2001, p. 322).

While the cinematic screen was designed for a single image, the computer screen introduced a bit-mapped display; “the one image/one screen logic was broken” (Manovich, p. 324). This new development introduced a form of montage (in the cinematic sense) in which moving images no longer replace each other but constantly remain on the screen. The (narrative) logic of replacement (characteristic of cinema) gave way to the logic of addition and coexistence (characteristics of database). Time became spatialized, distributed over the surface of the screen. As a consequence, “the diachronic dimension is no longer privileged over the synchronic dimension, time is no longer privileged over space, sequence is no longer privileged over simultaneity” (Manovich, 2001, p. 326).

GIFs are autonomous moving images that are capable of speaking for themselves outside narrative structures. However, they still need to be guided in certain directions in order to perform this ‘speaking’ outside their internal loop. As Hayles outlined, the user has to actively engage with the elements (making connections) in order to interpret them. While Manovich outlined the database as a passive space that refuses ordering, it still outlines several trajectories (suggesting possible connections) that this user can follow. These trajectories are based on so-called ‘hash-tags’, labels that are assigned to the GIFs by its authors and the creators of the database. Being in a constant mode of distracted concentration, the user does not search for a specific loop, but for a specific hash-tag. Not one, but thousands GIFs are capable of expressing her current mood, she therefore needs to be guided through the endless streams of data by trajectories that will lead her to the GIF she is unconsciously searching for. These trajectories are suggested by the database and are, for instance, categorized by assigned emotions (e.g. awkward), shared origin (e.g. a TV show) or a specific action (e.g. dancing).

Searching for #excited, GIPHY shows me over 23.000 results. One of the most popular ones displays the character ‘Kip’ in the film Napoleon Dynamite. While I am aware of this original context, its hash-tags (#tv, #excited, #yes, #score, #fuck yeah) do not mention this information. It apparently does not matter where the scene comes from, who this character is, or why he is excited. The only thing that matters is what the GIF could possibly ‘say’ and how it is connected to the 22.999 GIFs that surround it. Searching for #Kip #Napoleon, I get the same image in different editions, belonging to different trajectories and shown in different combinations. One GIF has thousands of possible labels, while its loop shows us the same action, over and over again. Labelling is therefore one of the most important skills for image-makers in the digital age, it is the only way they can have some control over the possible connections, and therefore the visibility and ‘findability’, of their images.

In contrast to linear cinema, the editing of GIFs is based on their possible (spatial), not sequential (linear) meaning. As a consequence, they always remain autonomous, holding on to their separate identities while constantly being part of relational probability. Manovich summarizes:

In spatial montage, borders between different worlds do not have to be erased; different spaces do not have to be matched in perspective, scale, and lightning; individual layers can retain their separate identities rather than being merged into a single space, different worlds can clash semantically rather than form a single universe. (2001, p. 158)

In other words, GIFs can be combined into larger syntagmatic dimensions, without losing their independence. They can be part of hundreds of trajectories, without losing their autonomy.

In his book on montage, Sam Rohdie (2006) discusses the work of Takeshi Kitano, who designed a game that was based on sixty-nine photographs, set out horizontally on two pages, without apparent order and common themes. Kitano invited other filmmakers to compose mini-narratives (syntagms) using any combination of four photographs from the sixty-nine images. Rohdie describes these images as: “fragments of hypothetical narratives, potential, undefined, unfinished, crossing each other, folding, partitioning, tracing, touching, a universe of virtual, incomplete narratives that never cease occurring” (2006, p. 9). A description that we can easily link to the sets of animated GIFs we see in a database like GIPHY. While GIFs present themselves to us as simple and shareable formats, their actual substance is as elusive and ungraspable as their contexts. Rohdie summarizes this interchange of shareablity and elusiveness as a:

play of constraint and openness (…), making every resolution irresolute and the definite uncertain. While each image is a document (objective), the narratives are pure contrivance (subjective), real without being true, belonging at once to fact and to imagination. What gives the narratives their momentum is not linearity or causation but this double play, lucid, simple and very complex. (2006, p. 7)

The GIF is the absolute master of this play of constraint and openness. Its rudimental form embodies endless possibility (paradigm), but this form also prevents the GIF from ending up in a definite combination (syntagm). The GIF does not only live in databases, it also mimics certain characteristics of these databases. While it looks like a (proto-cinematic) moving image, it behaves like a new media element. These two identities make the GIF the perfect format for the non-linear and non-hierarchical environment the database outlined: one satisfies the demands of human communication and interpretation (e.g. the cinematographic appearance) another makes it suitable for computer-based practices of production and distribution (e.g. the invisible codes of the database) (Manovich, 2001, p. 181). Furthermore, GIFs refuse to be merged in one single sequence, holding on to their separate identities while constantly being part of different combinations. In order to get a grip on this refusal, we have to analyze the GIF’s distinctive time-based form. A form that resembles another characteristic of both the database and proto-cinematic cinema: the loop.

Manovich suggests that the loop is “a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age”, as it occupies a liminal, anti-narrative space between story and instance (2001, xxxiii). While nineteenth-century proto-cinematic devices were already based on short loops, twentieth-century cinema banished the technique in favour of the forward-moving act of storytelling: the dominance of narrative as a cultural form seemed to have signed the loop’s death warrant. However, as Manovich notes, the loop returned on our radar while giving birth to computer programming: “if we strip down the computer from its usual interface and follow the execution of a typical computer program, the computer will reveal itself to be another version of Ford’s factory, with the loop as its conveyer belt” (2001, p. 217). This technical framework of the digital world is translated into visual output in the form of, for instance, the playback function in QuickTime or the infinite moving limbs belonging to Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. “Rather than being an archaic leftover, a reject from cinema’s evolution” (Manovich, 2001, p. 320), the loop suggests a new temporal aesthetics for computer-based media. The GIF could be seen as the epitome of how the moving image adjusted its structure in order to fit the above outlined database, while holding on to its cinematographic appearance. An appearance that we know and understand (as a visual language), but that is in need of a new mode of interpretation (on that is based on the database structure). We should therefore not consider the loop to be a restriction (like it was in the proto-cinematic era), but as a possibility for the new media age.

Manovich predicts that, “when digital videos appear on small displays in cellular phones (…) they will once again be arranged in short loops because of bandwidth, storage, or CPU limitations” (2001, p. 217). Seeing it from this perspective, the revival of the loop could be explained as a way of dealing with the restrictions of new media. Today, however, this issue of bandwidth is no longer a problem². While HD-video’s can easily be spread, watched and stored, they did not replace GIFs. We can explain this persistence of the GIF by considering the state of distracted concentration in which the user traverses the Internet once more. A video asks for certain efforts of its viewer in order to be seen (time, concentration, the act of clicking, the willingness to put in earplugs), the GIF just shows up: we can remain in a passive mode and still emerge ourselves in its movements. Or as Daniel Birnbaum put it: “[loops] convey a meditative, almost somnambulist, form of pleasure: nothing really happens, yet it's hard to stop watching” (1999). We are constantly confronted with the format, while we distractively scroll through our virtual lives, being physically present in the bus, on the escalator, or at the office. They appear out of nowhere in these endless scrolls, only to be seen for a short moment of our time. But even in these few seconds, their minimalistic looped frames are sufficient to produce the impression of presence, of life. While some create the illusion of an infinite loop by merging (and therefore diffusing our clear understanding of) the end and beginning of a movement, others simply repeat a single moment over and over again, erasing our reliance on fixed waypoints that usually lead us through a linear narrative. Consequently, GIFs evoke the idea of a continuous present, giving us the impression that, the moment we have stopped looking at them, they still continue to ‘run’, to live.

While a film usually unfolds a narrative system, the GIF denies traditional storytelling by establishing constant reappearance. By constructing this mesmerizing state, it touches on a fundamental conception of time: the eternal. While the GIF exists as an actual, temporal object, it is at the same time locked in a virtual, eternal presence. The infinite loop therefore embodies a movement beyond narrative, a statis. Tom McGinn (2014) argues that the endless repetition of the GIF transforms the moving image in a meaningless morph, “in so far as the original content no longer retains its semantic ties” (p. 19). The GIF resembles the mythical figure Ouroboros, the self-eating serpent that consumes itself in order to reproduce itself, a symbol for infinitude, cyclical recurrence and endless process. This absence of catharsis destroys our idea of progress, of accomplishment, pointing at the radical shift that Manovich outlined: the notion of beginning and end becomes redundant, the linear narrative as cultural form diminishes.

The seemingly rudimental format of the GIF symbolizes a large and complex transformation that is inevitably linked to the rise of the database as a symbolic form. We can describe the format as a reflection of the possibilities that Manovich outlined in 2001, and we might even go one step further and consider this format to be an evolution of his ideas. Like the frame of a database, the GIF’s construction is build to host an ongoing process (the loop), but this process does not allow for new elements to be added over time. While we can step in at any moment, the loop is without ends, a closed unity, evoking the opposite of a dead unstructured collection. The GIF is always in the ‘here and now’, and therefore it constantly escapes a unified and univocal meaning. To see a GIF, is to see it again. Every time we are confronted with it, we see it differently, opening up numerous possibilities for its future meaning in new contexts. Like the database it lives in, it has a preference for simultaneity over selection; it adapts to its (often temporary) habitat, selling itself as a flexible and therefore shareable tool of expression. Its user can assign its personal mood, ideas, meaning to it, marking the post-industrial society in which we live that emphasizes individual customization above mass standardization.

However, beyond this open and editable form, an uncanny resistance reveals itself. The GIF is always on loan, but never ours to own. Like its user, it is characterized by a ‘distracted concentration’. It seems like the GIF has no destination (fragmentary distraction), while it actually follows the same track: the never-ending loop (the epitome of concentration). Chris Baraniuk (2013) wonders in his article “The Wheel of the Devil”: “What if all media naturally looped like gifs? What if the notion of teleology and of beginning and end was really redundant; a feature of past media now considered archaic?”. By asking these questions, he does not only point at the significance of the loop as a technique, but also at a larger loop in the history of media, in which cultural forms are not replaced, but coexist, constantly shifting in weight. Like the GIF’s eternal return, this sense of history resembles an infinite loop. It reminds us of the first sentence of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything occurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify? (1984)

While the GIF may be insignificant as a format (in a few years, it will probably replaced by another version that better suits the technological developments of that time), its distinctive features point at a larger cultural shift that we should not underestimate. In this shift not only narrative structures are being overthrown, but also the comforting ideas of constant progression, of catharsis. GIFs undermine these ideas by reminding us that everything we see happened before and will happen again. The only way to deal with this eternal return is to recognize and embrace it, even if it feels useless and uncanny. As Samuel Beckett famously wrote in his play “Endgame”: “the end is the beginning and yet you go on” (1957). The GIF has, like Beckett’s plays, the ability to transform the normal into the absurd by endlessly repeating it, constantly challenging and disrupting the status quo.

• ¹ Oxford Dictionary states: “An organism living in symbiosis with another (…) formed irregulary from Greek sumbion ‘living together’, present particle of sumbion (see symbiosis)” (2017).
• ² Ironically, the files we consider to be GIFs are often videos that are instructed to act like animated GIFs. See: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21457/the-gif-is-dead-long-live-the-gif/

References:

• Aranda, J., Kuan Wood, B., Vidokie, A. (2015), ‘Introduction’, The Internet Does Not Exist, e-flux Inc, Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press, 5-9.
• Baraniuk, C. (2013, January 28). “The Wheel of the Devil”: On Vine, gifs and the power of the loop. Retrieved from: http://www.themachinestarts.com/read/2013-01-the-wheel-of-the-devil-vine-gifs-idea-of-loop
• Beckett, S. (1957). Endgame [Play]. Retrieved from http://www.unc.edu/courses/2006spring/engl/026/002/PDFs/Endgame.pdf
• Birnbaum, D. (1999, January 1). Loop Guru: Marijke van Warmerdam. Frieze, 1999(44). Retrieved from https://frieze.com/article/loop-guru?language=de
• Colomina, B. (2001). Enclosed by Images: The Eameses’ Multimedia Architecture. Grey Room, 2001(2), 6-29. Retrieved from http://csis.pace.edu/~marchese/TextImage/colomina_eames.pdf
• Daniel, S. (2007). The Database: An Aesthetics of Dignity in Vesna, V. (ed.) Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Minneapolis, US: University of Minnesota Press, 142-182.
• Deleuze, G., & Guattari, L. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi). Minneapolis, US: University of Minnesota Press.
• Derrida, J., & Prenowitz, E. (1995). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Diacritics, 25(2), 9-63. Retrieved from http://artsites.ucsc.edu/sdaniel/230/derrida_archivefever.pdf
• Katherine Hayles, N. (2012). How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago, US: The University of Chicago Press.