The GIF shows just keep coming. Along with “Wallpapers” and “GIF Free For All”, we now can thank “The Limited Collection” for 33 new GIFS. Organized by the London/Berlin-based La Scatola Gallery, curators Rozsa Zita Farkas and Valentina Fois are rolling out one GIF a day, through the end of the month, on tumblr. The “limited” refers to the fact that come October, the GIFs will be taken down and archived in a limited edition version to be sold by the gallery. As Tom Moody (a participating artist) points out on his blog, “The GIFs will continue to circulate on the internet and elsewhere, depending on whim and circumstance, thus avoiding the public relations gaffe of ‘taking the GIF offline so the collector can have it locally’ (which one institution attempted a while back).” Good. It doesn’t answer the question of whether collector audiences have a sterilizing effect on the medium, though; Paddy Johnson suspects that art fair trends are seeping into the GIF world already.
Anyway, “The Limited Collection” has been running since the end of August, so naturally, this provides us with the basis for another awards ceremony!
This time, highlights are selected for upholding the special weirdness that’s native to the art form. Above, you’ll see Viktor Timofeev’s “Synergeticka”, virtual reality gloves with little hands that come out of the fingertips. As you can see, they seem to be designed for the sole purpose of tickling an orange. I personally find this horrifying.
And then there’s Lawrence Lek’s “Shiva’s Folly”, presumably named for the Hindu god of great benevolence and destruction. I am no expert on Hinduism, so I defer to the wiki description: “At the highest level Shiva is limitless, transcendent, unchanging and formless”. I prefer to think of it as the moment in Ghostbusters when Gozer demands: “Choose the form of The Destructor!”
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