.gif Festival – Left Right Right Left Movement, .gif節左右右左移動

.gif Festival – Left Right Right Left Movement.gif節左右右左移動

23/06/2018 - 30/06/2018

In the early 10th century, Chinese invented ‘Trotting Horse Lamp’, by using the steaming candles within the lamp to activate a simple machine to rotate a wheel with paper cutting attached, creating a visual of a man chasing a horse in motion, hence establishing the prototype of animation. In 1878, for the first time in history, Eadweard Muybridge created a high-speed photography – 24 cameras were set on a single track and triggered by the actions of a horse’s legs, capturing the separate frames of a horse’s movement, inspiring the invention of cinematography.

As the most minimal format of moving image, GIF captures the aesthetics of motions in early cinema and animation productions, consecutive frames are imprinted on viewer’s eyeballs, creating optical illusions such as persistence of visions and apparent movements. With the elongated impression by procrastinated visuals, so as the involuntary action in filling gaps between still images, the flash of ephemerality within several seconds extends into an aura for eternity.

Within such format of moving image, the grand narrative in mainstream ideologies of moving images no longer stands on a higher ground than movement; pure perception is liberalized from the complex affections of individuals – visuals explode in this micro time-space within a second like electrical impulses.

“.gif Festival – Left Right Right Left Movement”- as an experiment on the curatorial framework – GIF is originally known as Graphics Interchange Format, is defined here as Generative Interactions Framework by us. The content of artworks goes through a constant progress of inherit, mutation, and evolution, within an organic mechanism as if DNA in our body cells, followed by a radical growth in number.

Artists drive on each other’s GIFs to generate a series of new GIFs, which will be the materials for experimentation in workshops and closing performance, and will be disseminated into Giphy for public use, sharing and reproduction.

By placing artists and general public into the model, we aim to generate content from the minimum context to the maximum, from the finite concepts to the infinite, together we explore the possibility of creation.

Long live .gif, LONG LIVE GIF