Reading 1 - Truc Le

          In Sally McKay’s “The Affect of Animated GIFs”, the author discussed internet art’s history, criticisms and the “affective qualities” of digital art, especially about the affect of GIF artworks. One of McKay’s GIF reviews that I like is the OptiDisc’s. In the OptiDisc’s analysis, I agree with McKay about the GIF’s mesmerizing effect only when I really focused on the piece alone. The more I looked at it, the more I become attracted to this tiny GIF. All of a sudden, I had need to analyze the GIF’s effect, but this need only happened if I forced myself to pay attention to the GIF and nothing else. Like many other internet users, I would not go deep into analyzing any GIF’s effect because I consider GIFs as trivial and carrying no good information for my daily work. According to McKay, “there has rarely been any analyses of affective quality of GIFs”. In my opinion, the reason of this neglect is because most audience consider GIFs as a form of short entertainment instead viewing them like pure pieces of art.

this GIF has a mesmerizing effect only if you look at it long enough
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Furthermore, McKay claimed that GIFs can stimulate viewers and making GIF arts available to the audience requires less effort than using other media such as gallery installation or cinema. Nevertheless, I think that a GIF’s strength also results in its weakness. Because GIFs are often looping short sequences, they usually do not carry deep meaning. Some of the GIFs like OptiDisc do give an intensive impression on the audience, but they do not send a deep message that would be remembered long.

a pixelated GIF that creates a cold lonely feeling
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After looking at the three GIFs’ analysis, I see that McKay is categorizing GIFs into three types: short GIFs that can give intensive impression, purposely-glitchy GIFs which requires certain knowledge in order to understand, and long GIFs that tell a story. In my opinion, the first type is the most ubiquitous on the internet and it also creates the stereotype of GIFs. I do not like the second type because I like clean and neat arts. The third type may carry a message but it is widely available. In Brad Troemel’s “The GIF's Obsession with Compression”, the author also made the point that although GIFs can show an emotion or impression in a concise manner (because they often are compressed and pixelated), they are not the preferred method to express a deeper aesthetic meaning. Therefore, at the moment, I still consider GIFs as comical artworks although they do produce some nice impressions.