Pop-up Giphy Gallery makes the case for GIFs as fine art

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On 5 September, the online platform and digital library Giphy joined forces with the Museum of Modern GIFs (MoMG), a digital archive featuring nearly 100,000 GIFs, the popular short-form animated image files, to launch a special capsule collection—the Giphy Gallery. Featuring three original GIFs by each of the more than 75 participating artists, the collaboration between Giphy and MoMG founder Daniel Murray operates both as a nostalgic revival and a radical reimagining of a tried-and-true format, opening up new avenues for implementation beyond ephemerality. Some of the works on view include steampunk GIFs by Aleksey Efremov, 1990s throwback tableaux by Sholim and futuristic fare by Sam Rolfe.

Timed to the celebration of National GIF day, the Giphy Gallery launched with a one-night immersive exhibition, complete with looped projections of the featured GIFs flooding the walls of Lume Studios in Manhattan’s Soho neighbourhood. As we enter yet another digital revolution defined by break-neck artificial intelligence (AI) development and uncertain outcomes, Tyler Menzel, the vice president of content for Giphy, sees something refreshing in the stalwart GIF model of online yesteryear.

“There is this nostalgia for an internet that was more of a wild west, more creative,” Menzel tells The Art Newspaper. “I don’t know about you, but I learned to code from creating my MySpace page. Places like AngelFire, GeoCities—you could really make those your own. GIFs as a medium really remind us all of being kids and the places on the internet where we could really be creators, you could really put your stamp on something.”

Menzel also speaks to the way GIFs have become second-nature to netizens all over the world, making them a particularly fruitful mode of artistic engagement.

“Giphy’s been around for 12 years now,” he says. “We’ve really seen GIFs become adopted by the mainstream—we have integrations in all the top messaging apps and there is a true utility to GIFs. They’ve really become a language, a tool to express yourself. The Giphy Gallery isn’t necessarily content you’d drop into the family groupchat, it’s more complex…it’s a utilisation of the form that can be crazy, wild and interesting.”

The artists featured were chosen from a pool of applicants interested in being Giphy creators and selected for diversity of vision, Menzel says. “We just wanted to have a good spread of a lot of different artists showcasing a lot of different visual styles.”

How did we GIF here?

The GIF (or Graphics Interchange Format) was invented on 15 June,1987 by Steve Wilhite (1948-2022), a computer scientist at the now-defunct internet company Compuserve. In his quest to develop new ways of compressing images without losing data, Wilhite designed a short-form looped video of a plane flying through the sky, pioneering a new, flexible format for low-resolution pictures.

In one fell swoop, our collective digital lexicon changed forever, establishing a new mode of interpersonal communication and artistic expression that would come to define the virtual age. GIFs grew up with the internet, thriving in coded symbiosis with platforms like Tumblr, Twitter (now X) and Reddit in an otherwise obsolescence-fueled online ecosystem. It is precisely this durability of form that has landed GIFs at the center of zeitgeist after zeitgeist, providing nearly 40 years of fun reactions and thought-provoking artistic discovery.

Inside the Giphy Gallery pop-up Courtesy Giphy

“Giphy emailed me and said, ‘We want to do something with the GIF gallery, maybe an interview,'” Murray recalls. “I said, ‘Actually, what if I just curate a gallery for you?’ They liked the idea.”

Murray, who has been making web-based art since 2016, started compiling GIFs during the pandemic. “I had a sudden, deep, profound terror that they were about to vanish from the world and I thought, I really need to save these right now because I can’t do my projects if I don’t have them,” he says. “Once I had them saved, I just thought: this is cool, why not turn this into something? And that’s how the museum project started.”

Murray has an expansive view of GIFs and their role in the greater creative galaxy. “Like all good human culture, GIFs just are,” he says. “Whether it’s a car on the street, or a GIF on the web, it simply is a part of human construction. The meaning is not important.”

He adds: “I don’t think it’s nostalgia. I don’t think it’s really even generational. It’s simply an ability to see what is going on around you, right into one fragment of the moment.”

The animated GIF glorifies this “fragment” of a moment, morphing something instantaneous into an instrument for resonance. For Giphy Gallery artist John Fogarty, based in Rutherford, New Jersey, his painterly, dream-like loops achieve an immediacy that digital natives appreciate.

“I have a crystal pyramid that I put in my window and then film the rainbows through. I use this program called LunaPic which is very simple, anybody can use it online and I just make things,” Fogarty says. He has been making GIFs since 2014, and was attracted to the democratic nature of the medium.

“It was interesting meeting a lot of random people online who weren’t gatekeeping or anything, and allowed somebody who really didn’t know what they were doing other than just using really intuitive software available,” Fogarty says. “I’m just glad to be a part of this. It’s like another world.”