GIFs: The Growing Art Form

This assignment is in response to the history of GIFs and the growing sensation it has become in the last six years.

Art can no longer be categorized as paper on walls or simple paintings. It has expanded to the Internet and taken over our lives in one way or another, whether we realize it or not. With the ever-growing media outlets and softwares becoming available on the Internet, GIFs have become a growing sensation for the last six years. GIFs are, to say the least, a form of digital art that captures one moment in time and repeats it over and over, creating another dimension that's unexplainable, yet so easy for the people of my generation to accept and understand.

This generation and GIFs go hand-in-hand. GIFs have steadily become a way of communication between millennials and Gen Z due to the visual message that a single GIF holds. Personally, I use GIFs as reactions to something my friends' say. There is a message in every GIF and it seems like sometimes GIFs can speak louder than any text can. As Maggie Lange from The Cut explains, GIFs create a hyperreality for the audience. And this is true, mostly because an effective GIF is one that immerses the viewer into the message. It should be more than just viewing a repetitive, moving picture, but about feeling the artistic value within a moment in time.

No matter how weird Tumblr can get or how useless a certain GIF may seem, GIFs are a form of art that can be easily misunderstood. A GIF may not start as an artistic form, but can easily become one. Art in general is meant to catch the viewers' eye and to make something that seems completely normal stand out, and GIFs act as the same eye-catcher. Take the GIFs Are the New Graffiti article by Yohana Desta for example. The GIFs that were "tagged" in the streets of London made the viewers stop to look, made them pause to determine what was being said through the GIF. This is what a good GIF does; it makes you look at the moving picture and actually think.

Each GIF has it's own particular meaning, whether to entertain a viewer, react to a certain piece of information, or become an artistic life of its own. Our generation has always learned to accept a new technology and move on. But I think that GIFs have become an integral part of the way we communicate and may be around for quite a while longer.