Remember the days of the old Internet, when you’d sit around waiting to connect? Maybe you’d while away the time listening to the creaky ring of a dial-up modem. This was The Most Unbearable Wait. Not that waiting is, in itself, a terrible thing.
For an example of why patience is a virtue, see the GIF exhibition Crazy, Sexy, Cool. Curated by artist Jennifer Chan in not-so-long-ago 2013, the exhibition harkens back to the slo-mo days of old. That’s not because it’s full of nostalgia—although there are some Geocities-lite features—but because the exhibition structure forces you to be slow, and spend time with the individual GIFs.
In order to see an artist’s work, you’ve got to click on the artist’s image-icon folder. Only then will a single work load—and sometimes very slowly—in a new pop-up window. (Another example of this individual opening of GIFs: GIF Wrapping.) Then, before viewing the next image, you’ve got to “X” out of the pop-up window. Slow, slow, slow.
What’s the opposite of this slow, click-and-load format? The infinite scroll. With it, GIFs are consumed as quickly as your fingers can move along a trackpad. Not all GIFs are made for Tumblr, though, so I’d like to see more experimentation in the format. Like the way it was in 2013, a good year for slowing down GIFs on the web.
Comments on this entry are closed.