#4. Anxiety and the Animated Gif
I like animated GIFs, a lot. Amidst the chaos and anxiety of the internet, GIFs are a calming flickering balm. With routinely devastating daily news, GIFs are a type of digital transferable temporal sanctuary. When I am especially anxious, I am especially prone to fixate on GIFs. Unlike another gem of the internet, GIFs are less prone to be adapted to hate speech than the meme (i.e. Pepe the frog, any meme about a female politician…) If my iphone is a pandora’s box (née jar) of digital anxiety, the animated GIF is the hope left behind.
I first fell hard for gifs over ten years ago when I was applying to graduate programs. As I weighed my future, finances, and of investing in another degree in the arts, I kept finding myself drawn again and again to GIFs of Taylor Swift awkwardly dancing. This was pre-1989/folklore/ Eras Tour Taylor Swift. Yes she was famous, but not anywhere near the astronomical sphere that she orbits in today. At that point, she was an extremely successful young artist with a nearly unheard of amount of control over her own career and narrative for someone so young, let alone female. The awkward dancing was a reminder that you can be powerful, but also really really awkward. It makes that young female power a bit less daunting, like early suffragettes knitting on stage advocating for women’s rights.
The other vital element of these GIFs is the sheer unadulterated joy. Joy at her good fortune and joy at being able to celebrate and fangirl over the talented people around her. It’s also a subterfuge against anxiety. High pressure awards show stress?? Have the most possible fun you can have while whole-heartedly supporting your peers.
As I would anxiously search for these GIFs, I soon became disappointed to find that there was no main repository. In time, many of my favorite GIFs became increasingly hard to find. The ubiquitous becomes the ephemeral, circulating in and out of the internet’s fancy. I needed a place where I could find them without fail and without clogging up the storage in my phone. So I made one on tumblr, Awkward Taylor Swift Dancing.
I then combined this with one of my other most calming things, museums. My favorite time to go to a museum is in the evening. Most museums have at least one night of public evening hours, and more so for members. The change in hour and crowd levels allow your relationship with the works to also change and as a result become more intimate. Combining pop culture with art history via GIFs is another form of this process for me. The format of famous paintings and digital GIFs also muddles the lines between high art and low, mass consumption and unique creations.
During the pandemic, the outside world shrunk as the internal world within my phone became simultaneously more expansive and more threatening. Needing the soothing balm of cat GIFs and being frustrated with the popular ones circulating, I took advantage of having very photogenic cats and started making GIFs of my cats. Integrating into GIPHY, I found myself able to pull up gifs of my cat on a variety of social platforms and communication channels. There’s a particular joy in finding one unexpectedly, like when my partner searches 'judgy cat’ GIFs at work on google teams and our very own judgy cat comes up. A familiar lighthouse in the consuming chaos of the internet.
With last year’s presidential election and the now current administration, Moo Deng, the viral baby Pygmy Hippo in Thailand became a necessary nutrient in my GIF diet. Her tenacity! Her fearlessness! Her tiny size! If only we all could channel her (then) tiny ferocity against this big bad world.
I am not great at making gifs. I’m a painter by training and never would be mistaken for a savvy animator. Occasionally I brush up my skills, but for the most part I make GIFs when my brain is anxious, which is also not a great time to learn new skills. For me, it’s not about making something sleek and shiny. It’s about spending time with an image that brings me joy. Slowing down, frame by frame.
Like the emoji, GIFs are close to a visual universal language as we get in our modern world, but with specificity and freedom of being a linguistic tools not exclusively being made by the makers of emojis, unicode. Albeit, this is changing rapidly with AI and ‘make your own emoji’ and stickers, but these are more made for personal use than internet dissemination. Making one’s own GIFs and setting them free to circulate amongst internet communication culture is adding new words to an ever evolving abstract dictionary. With a world evermore complicated and isolating, pinpointing a feeling or idea with a short frame by frame shareable moving image is one digital connective thread that I don’t want to let go of.
This remains my favourite tumblr and piece of high vs low pop culture