In the countdown to the Art F City 10th Anniversary Auction honoring artist Laurie Anderson, we’ll be previewing GIFs from our 10th Anniversary GIF and Print Portfolio, a limited-edition suite of prints and GIFs that includes work by Morehshin Allahyari, Jennifer Chan, Faith Holland, Sara Ludy, Claudia Maté, Rosa Menkman, Lorna Mills, Eva Papamargariti, Angela Washko, and Giselle Zatonyl. Today we’re looking at Jennifer Chan’s “lossy.gif.”
Jennifer Chan knows what she’s doing. As soon as I clicked on a Dropbox link to view “lossy.gif” I thought of Joan Jonas’s “Vertical Roll” (1972). And yes, Chan notes it’s a reference in “lossy.gif”—she knows what she’s doing.
I used to be obsessed with “Vertical Roll,” probably because it’s one of the best visual metaphors—ever—for being trapped inside a machine. That sentiment, of getting stuck to/inside/with technology, is still relevant. The analog visual glitches in “Vertical Roll” end up looking fairly similar to the digital ones we counter nearly every day, with crashing browsers, slow-loading videos. Hers is a body that gets stuck smack dab in the middle of an always-failing technology.
Like Jonas, Jennifer Chan can’t escape the glitch. Over email, she used the webcam software Cam Twist to simulate the roll, and create that ghostly effect. You can barely see Chan, in her squeezed-out, blurred out body, but she’s there.
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