Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art by Gabrielle Jennings

Author:Gabrielle Jennings
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520282476
Publisher: University of California Press

DISSOCIATION—CAITLIN JONES

LORNA MILLS: VISUAL ART, IMAGES & ANIMATIONS

http://www.digitalmediatree.com/sallymckay/LornaMillsImageDump/pageback/60891/

Through my choice I’d like to address two thoughts related to abstraction and the moving image online: the enduring importance of the animated GIF and our current culture of total image saturation—with saturation meaning the sheer volume of images existing on the web almost completely dissociated, or “abstracted,” from their original context, form, and meaning. Whether it’s through Reddit, Tumblr, 4chan, or another, unattributed images have become a common currency of the web. An artist who I think addresses both of my concerns simultaneously is the Canadian Lorna Mills. Her prolific, profane, hilarious, and often disturbing animated GIFs represent a different take on the notion of abstraction and the moving image.

The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) was an early animation format with limited color and low resolution. These attributes made it easy to create and distribute moving images regardless of processing speed or bandwidth. Wildly popular, artists of the early net.art era relied on it heavily, and it has continued to be used by a range of artists. Most significant, however, is the use of animated GIFs in what Internet art pioneer Olia Lialina refers to as part of the Vernacular Web, the web of amateurs “soon to be washed away by dot-com ambitions, professional authoring tools, and guidelines designed by usability experts.”11 But GIFs didn’t wash away; in fact, they have only risen in popularity.

As an artist, Mills has obsessively and deliberately been working in this format since 2005. Combining shot footage (which she shoots herself) with found images, she refers to herself as “ravingly formal and very precise” with her compositions.12 Although in some cases they can be shown offline as video, her GIFs are deeply imbedded in the Internet from both a technological and sociological perspective.

While Mills has created more prototypically “abstract” images, what is interesting to me in the context of this discussion is her blog, which can be read as a whole entity/artwork. The forced compression of the GIF format, the hard pixelated edges and the images’ complete removal from their original context (they are both known and foreign to us) represent another way of thinking about abstraction—that of dissociation. In a blog format, her varied subjects—“vehicular accidents, men and women wanking with rubber dolphins, masturbating kangaroos, animals humping inanimate objects, animals who smoke, people fighting, animals fighting, pro wrestling, and owls doing absolutely anything”—juxtaposed and seemingly eternally scrolling, create a disorienting viewing experience that adds another layer of abstraction.13 Even though GIFs are created out of representational images, they are radically abstract.

A post from December 20, 2013 shows three images (fig. 9.4).14 One, a composite of tongues, teeth, and water, creates a moving monochrome, identifiable but disembodied; it is abstracted on almost every level. In the next, pixelated, flapping dragons hover around a roast chicken with jiggling human female breasts (a sub-meme found on the web), abstracting and then conflating elements of three major Internet classifications—fantasy, food, and porn—into a single image. The final image depicts a snake swallowing its own tail, a crude and jagged overlay on an image of an inconsistently rotating earth.

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