Suspended between stillness and movement, GIF images embody the meta-modern dialectical principle in their own technological structure. Of course they move, right, but their movement is frozen in an endless repetition of the same few frames. The paradoxical constitution of GIFs thus appears to mimic on the formal level the blocked dialectic of capitalism, its incessant pursuit of change that never changes anything.” DalAsta
Starting with GIFs’ origins, their history, and reasons for their omnipresence we will move to feedback loops, echo chambers, input and output modes of today’s digital objects, as well as IRL phenomena that follow the logic of oscillation, moving back and forth…