Playing in the Gif(t) Economy

The Gif(t) Economy

The Internet’s sharing economy encompasses a diverse set of activities—crowdsourcing on Wikipedia, following on Twitter, bartering on Craigslist, and so on. These activities have been understood as reviving precapitalist forms of exchange, the gift economies of so-called primitive societies, such as those studied in anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s 1925 study The Gift. For instance, in his essay “The Hi-Tech Gift Economy,” Richard Barbrook (1998) captured the enthusiasm surrounding the potential for digital technologies to provide an alternative system of exchange to capitalism. “The gift is supposedly about to replace the commodity,” Barbrook wrote, commenting further that:

For most of its users, the Net is somewhere to work, play, love, learn and discuss with other people…Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas.

Barbrook’s essay notably tempered this enthusiasm by observing that the Internet more accurately reflected a mixed economy, one where commodity and gift exchange exist side by side, sometimes working cooperatively, and other times in tension. ²

What sets the circulation of animated GIFs apart from this culture of sharing is the nature of the object itself. The recent popularity of these looping animations stems from their particular appeal, explicable through Mauss’s notion of the gift. The gift is not an ordinary object; it is animistic, enlivened by the spirit of its source. Though it remains a mere token, not necessarily of any intrinsic worth of its own, its value comes from serving as a totem of what cannot be passed along or as an emblem of what is immaterial. As Mauss observed, the Maori tribes of New Zealand had a term for the totemic objects that served as gifts. They were called “tonga,” meaning “indestructible property.” Each Tonga carried what Mauss called “the spirit of the thing given,” or what the Maori called “hau.” This spirit derives from the original context of the object. The tonga, Mauss (1925, pp. 9–10) indicates, is “animated with the hau of its forest, its soil, its homeland.”

This formulation applies to the specific types of GIFs under consideration here. In appropriating popular films, television shows, and video games, GIF animations depend in part on their source material for their impact and effectiveness. Regardless of their manipulation of the original images, it nonetheless remains indebted to them. This might indicate a debt to the recognizability of the star, or to the character depicted, or to an iconic action. The captivating nature of the GIF animation is at least partially dependent on the charisma of its source material, its “homeland.”

Just as the totemic object serves as a visual, material emblem of that which cannot be held, or grasped in its totality—that is, the spirit of the forest—the GIF animation stands in for what is unable to be circulated. They are tokens of spectatorship; they retain the memory of the spectatorial experience beyond its initial encounter. Given that GIFs were designed for the purpose of easy transmission, for uninhibited movement, the restriction on the circulation of cultural products through antipiracy efforts and copyright enforcement means that it is more difficult for the original to “travel” and to some degree, the popularity of the decidedly mobile GIF is a response to the relative immobility of the source material.

Animated Pictures, Animistic Object

As an emblem of an original experience, the GIF recalls in a digital context the connection made by classical film theorists between the animism of the totemic object and the animation of the moving image, where cinema was conceived as a form of “modern magic.” As Mauss (1925, p. 10) writes, “the thing given is not inert. It is alive and often personified.” The animism of the gift, its “personality,” thereby distinguishes it from a mere object, and it produces a spectatorial response characterized by fascination or captivation. For instance, in reference to the decorative coins of the Trobriand Islands, Mauss (p. 22) writes that they

are not indifferent things; they are more than mere coins. All of them, at least the most valuable and most coveted, have a name, a personality, a past, and even a legend attached to them, to such an extent that people may be named after them … To possess one is ‘exhilarating, comforting, soothing in itself’. Their owners handle them and gaze at them for hours. Mere contact with them is enough to make them transmit their virtues. You place a vaygu’a [decorative coin] on the brow or chest of a sick man, or dangle it before his face. It is his supreme balm.

The GIF captivates in much the same way. Its repetition indicates that a viewer is not guided along by a narrative structuring of time. The viewer is rather caught up in the GIF’s temporal suspension: to view it is to be captivated. This recalls Roger Caillois’s (1961) classification of games where certain forms of play entail mimicry and vertigo—the appropriative nature of the GIF allows the image to simulate variable meanings while its repetitive mode plunges its viewer into a trance-like fascination. But what makes the GIF so compelling to look at?

Without discounting the incredible diversity of GIFs, one particularly common trope is the animation’s emphasis on the facial expression or the gesture—a person’s raised eyebrows, or surprised double take, or missed high five. Classical film theorists such as Jean Epstein (1921), Béla Balázs (1924/2010), and Sergei Eisenstein (1969) placed film’s representation of the gesture at the center of the medium’s “animistic tendency.” As Rachel Moore (1999) argues, the then newly emergent technology of cinema, according to these theorists, was thought to bypass language—which they considered to be rationalized and ossified—in order to put the viewer in direct contact with physical reality, and more specifically, with prelinguistic forms of communication. Moore (p. 20) writes:

By regaining access to gesture, the cinema could reveal the secrets of things and souls inexpressible in the impoverished language of mere words. The cinema opened its subjects anew to physiognomic inspection, allowing the spectator to pursue the nonsensuous correspondences between image and meaning so as to convey, in Balázs’s view, ‘non-rational emotions.’

Balázs contended that the silent art of cinema recovered a gestural language long since forgotten, but in which a spectator could be retrained to notice. Epstein likewise viewed the medium of film, though emblematic of technological modernity, as capable of expressing “primitive” modes of communication, and again like Balázs, the language of cinema was nonrational and indeed, animistic, since it endows its depicted objects with a “semblance of life.” Epstein (in Moore, 1999, p. 30) writes, “The more primitive a language, the more marked this animistic tendency. There is no need to stress the extent to which the language of cinema remains primitive in its terms and ideas.” The GIF reclaims this celebratory moment of cinema from the perspective of new media. It isolates and “purifies” the expressive moment or the gestural action from the source material (even as the frequently used text macros overlaid on GIF animations channel this open-endedness toward new contexts). The repetition of the animation, moreover, captures the spectator, keeping what was previously an ephemeral moment suspended before her eyes. ³

The aspects of repetition and play at work in the GIF, moreover, prompt a consideration of these animations in relation to Walter Benjamin’s well-known evaluation of aura in relation to representational technologies. Recent historiographic work on Benjamin’s “Artwork” essay, particularly by Miriam Hansen (2012), have focused on elements included in earlier drafts but ultimately left out of the version published in Illuminations (1969). Chief among those elements is Benjamin’s focus on play, as with his claim (in Hansen, 2012, p. 190) that, “What is lost in the withering of semblance [Schein], or decay of the aura, in works of art is matched by a huge gain in the scope for play [Spielraum]. This room for play is widest in film. In film, the element of semblance has been entirely displaced by an element of play.” Play becomes a model for nondestructive innervation, a mode of accommodation to technological change unmoored from socially productive ends. Film, of course, had been Benjamin’s prime example of this form of accommodation, since it provides reproduces the sensory and perceptual conditions of modernity in the mode of play. The question is to what extent film, as a technological form, continues to play this role, as its exhibition is increasingly regularized, as its distribution is restricted by copyright, as its forms of experimentation have ossified into tradition.

Benjamin’s “room for play” theorizes a space outside of reified forms of play, such as professional sports, but not opposed to technology. Similarly, Caillois (1961) lauds the hobby as a creative response to commercialized leisure, to the “corruption of games,” that provides a compensation to the alienating conditions of modern life. It entails an appropriative use of technology, outside the logic of the commodity. GIF creation, as I have been arguing, activates this mode of playful innervation, displacing the role played by film for Benjamin, a medium that has long been subject to commodification. This commodification has significantly restricted the circulation of moving images; GIF production makes moving images move again.

Central to this claim about play is Benjamin’s focus on gesture and repetition, essential to both child’s play and the comedic gag, especially that of Benjamin’s frequent touchstone, Chaplin. As Hansen (2012, p. 194) writes, “Comedy and play have in common the principle of repetition. As many writers have pointed out, comic modes—irony, parody, satire, sight gags—involve structures of citationality: they work through quotation and reiteration.” “Repetition is the soul of play,” argues Benjamin, and in play’s recurrence of action he envisions the opportunity for a nondestructive innervation of technology. The gag especially inverts the logic of narrative causality, and its repetitive nature opens it up to multiple contexts. Its meaning ceases to be closed off or predetermined. This is the advantage of play for Benjamin, and for film’s ability to revivify one’s relation to the world, as we frequently imagine with the child at play. This is further what Benjamin means by Spielraum: in Hansen’s (p. 192) gloss, “It names an intermediary zone not yet fully determined in which things oscillate among different meanings, functions, and possible directions.”

The GIF occupies this intermediary zone, pressing its excerpts of popular cultural texts into different uses. The comedic action, awkward expression, or ridiculous gesture is especially common material for these animations, as they carry out the reversal of values implicit in the comedic gag. GIF creation constitutes, within this historical moment, the “room for play” that Benjamin reserved for film. Its citationality, repetition, and deployment of gesture present it as a means for playful appropriation, as a counter to the atomized nature of the spectatorial encounter with moving images. The convergence of media forms via digital technologies, evidenced in gaming and in GIF creation, recaptures the antiauratic potential of film. This historical coincidence allows us to narrate a nonlinear history of media forms where technological change reinvigorates outmoded forms of viewership. GIF creation may recall the liberatory potential of early cinema, but also, its activation of “room for play,” or more simply “playroom,” forges unexpected alliances with gaming as an immersive and interactive engagement with the virtual space of the image. The repurposing of source material inherent to GIF creation is structurally similar to the unfolding temporality of gameplay such that new dimensions of the text open up to the user depending on their participation.

The Dispossessive Spectator

Laura Mulvey (2006) describes the appropriative relationship between spectator and text enabled by digital technologies through the figure of the “possessive spectator.” Whereas spectators formerly had limited means to still the moving image—primarily through studio-approved publicity photos—digital viewing platforms offer a range of options to capture or otherwise augment a film, as the spectator bypasses narrative elements in order to attend to the ephemeral aspects of the medium—the incidental detail or the star image. Publicity stills entail, Mulvey argues, only the “illusion of possession,” but the digital extraction of the single frame from the flow of the film allows for extended contemplation and the impulse to collect and hoard. As Mulvey indicates, digital technologies open up “new dimensions” in the text, democratizing the cinephile’s obsessive attachment to the detail.

The act of GIF creation entails an appropriation of moving-image fragments culled from the film or television program that Mulvey (2006, p. 171) would consider indicative of the disruptive nature of the possessive spectator to the narrative integrity of the work: “The possessive spectator commits an act of violence against the cohesion of a story, the aesthetic integrity that holds it together, and the vision of its creator.” While Mulvey’s privileged example of the captured frame highlights the pose of the actor, GIFs temporalize that image without being open-ended. The singularity of the pose is replaced by the unity of the gesture. In many instances, GIF imagery that appropriates moving images seeks to isolate a single meaningful expression. Its meaning is generally not ambiguous. Rather, geared for maximum impact and immediacy of effect, GIFs do not depend on contextual cues to be understood. To cite one example, the frequently seen GIF of Charles Foster Kane applauding vigorously, from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), is used to indicate enthusiastic approval. This GIF also serves as a useful example of the “violence” perpetrated against its narrative context, since the original shot of Kane applauding, at the disastrous opera premiere of his wife, indexes the extent of his hubris. Having orchestrated his wife’s doomed music career, bankrolling the entire operation only to see it face derision, the limitations of Kane’s ability to bend the world to his will are revealed. Ripped from this contextual frame, the GIF image of this shot loses this particular nuance, making Kane’s applause seem sincere rather than hysterical.

Viewed differently, though, the Kane GIF testifies to the ingenuity and creativity of an anonymous group of Internet users. Their appropriation of Kane’s overzealous applause does some violence to the original intention of Welles, but this type of crowdsourced repurposing is just one manifestation of a series of pressures (whether industrial, social, or legal) undermining the Romantic concept of the artist. GIF creation is a part of a broader cultural shift away from this more circumscribed understanding of artistic production, a shift that acknowledges, and often flaunts, its basis in a multiplicity of creators, not to mention imitation, appropriation, and improvisation.

GIFs challenge Mulvey’s understanding of the possessive spectator in a number of ways. Mulvey argues, for instance, that the possessive spectator’s fragmentation of the text disrupts the aesthetic integrity of the work. This claim reveals its limits when considering a text for which unity is not an aesthetic value. Mulvey is concerned with the impact on digital technologies on a classically narrated text. Contemporary film and television production, however, is attuned to the different forms of new media spectatorship, and this awareness is often built into the texts themselves. This is the case with the NBC sitcom Community, whose creator Dan Harmon has specified (even as he is likely exaggerating) that every episode feature one GIF-able moment with the actress Alison Brie. It is not violence to the aesthetic unity of the text; rather, the film or television show is constructed around its own potential “misuse.” Alexander Galloway (2006) understands the practice of modding in similar terms to the GIF’s appropriative relation to the text. Borrowing and adapting Peter Wollen’s well-known rubric for countercinema, which critically engages classical cinema through a politics of form, he identifies types of countergaming that redirects the actionable gamespace toward aesthetic appearance, similar to the GIF’s reorientation of the text away from narrative and toward movement, gesture, and expression.

GIF creation entails liberating the image from its source, not to possess it, as Mulvey indicates, but to give it away, to pass it over to a community of users who then determine its meaning. To slightly revise Mulvey, we can think about this act through the figure of the dispossessive spectator. While Mulvey’s spectator is invested in control and mastery (a “will to power”), the dispossessive spectator highlights that this proprietary claim over the image is only a provisional step toward its deployment in other contexts. The dispossessive spectator is not interested in claiming the image for her own. Instead, she transforms the image into an object of play, available to be used by anyone and whose meaning is partly dependent on these uses, just as play is conducted through the consent of the players. The dispossessive spectator therefore rejects the strictly appropriative relation between text and viewer in favor of a decidedly social form of creation and circulation.

Gif(t) Exchange

The sharing economies of the Internet value dispossession more than possession. It values the principle that in giving freely, without expectation of a return, users receive something in excess to their contribution, as with the case of Wikipedia. This promise of a return, absent the expectation of it, is one of the defining elements of the gift. “Gifts do not earn profit, they give increase,” writes Lewis Hyde (1983, p. 47, emphasis original) in his book-length study of the gift. Hyde (p. 44) recounts an archetype of folk tales about the magical conversion of dross into gold, where when an individual seeks to capitalize on the gift, it disappears: “Typically the increase inheres in the gift only so long as it is treated as such—as soon as the happy mortal starts to count it or grabs his wheelbarrow and heads back for more, the gold reverts to straw. The growth is in the sentiment; it can’t be put on the scale.” Unlike the commodity, wealth and prestige in gift economies are determined not by who possesses the most, but rather by who dispossesses the most. To give up your personal wealth is to accrue mana, or prestige, since the spirit of the gift turns against an individual who hoards it. One can think of mana as akin to “karma” on the social networking site Reddit. The prestige of a member in the community is determined by how much they give away, share, comment, rather than consume without participation (lurking).

As Hyde (p. 47) observes, moreover, “the increase comes to a gift as it moves from second to third party, not in the simpler passage from first to second.” Thus, while the reciprocity of exchange between creator and user in the production of the GIF does entail a gift relation, the increase associated with this gift is a function of its circulation throughout a community of users. The resurgence of the GIF has been coincident with the rise of social networking, and this relation is not accidental. The nature of the GIF is to circulate, and it therefore thrives in a digital ecosystem built around sharing, retweeting, and following. The GIF is a type of cultural appropriation that acts as a counterweight to the restrictions on the use of moving images when treated as commodities. Though GIFs may not establish communities on their own, their sharing forges communal bonds that sustain existing relationships. The GIF walls that populate Tumblr, for instance, are often organized around personal identity (gays and lesbians, graduate students, individuals who came of age in the 1990s, etc.)—groups that, in other words, already maintain shared experiences and lexicon. GIFs entail a spectatorial engagement with popular culture inflected around these identities.

The GIF Market

In considering GIFs, the balance between art and commerce, gift and commodity, and play and labor is currently tipped in favor of open exchange and free use. However, we may in fact increasingly witness the enclosure of this commons, or less severely, more professionalized uses of the format that compete directly with its informal use by anonymous creators. As GIFs as digital art continues to make inroads into fine art contexts, their value as sentimental artifacts of viewership diminishes. The monetization of the format does not replace its unrestricted use, but it does create an internal division with how the GIF is culturally perceived—for example, between amateur and professional.

For instance, artists Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach created GIF Market (gifmarket.net) that lists 1,024 animated GIFs for sale. All the listed GIFs are variations in a series—a single, black vertical line around which one-pixel dots orbit, the number of dots determined by the number of the GIF in the series. In a different vein, photographer Jamie Beck and web designer Kevin Burg produce what they call “cinemagraphs,” a nominal distinction that underlines the transition of the GIF into a market exchange. Their cinemagraphs are created from original photography, reinscribing the traditional role of the artist, and often feature more subtle movements than the standard GIF, so that, for example, the only source of motion will be from the flutter of a newspaper, or most famously, Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s head turning to follow a runway model. These cinemagraphs are in demand from advertisers, who use the format to grab the attention of consumers.

Bringing attention to the new forms of monetizing GIF production is meant to illustrate that there is nothing inherently revolutionary about the format itself. While it does currently function as a realm of play, of the unrestricted use of the moving image, just as cinema before it, it can just easily follow the familiar trajectory of the enclosure of the commons. The cultural meanings of the format are entirely the result of the uses to which it is put, and the ways those potential uses are enabled, or not, by various restrictions. The enduring potential of the GIF as a format to resist these professionalizing influences, it should be noted, resides in the format’s low-fi technological base and corresponding aesthetic look. Hard-wired into the technological format itself, the amateur aesthetic of the GIF—with its silence, choppiness, delayed load time, and lower resolution—may work to ensure that it continues to be a channel for unofficial and user-generated cultural production, while more professional content creators migrate to other, more sophisticated formats. ⁴ The central point about GIF creation and circulation is that it establishes this mode of play parallel to the official channels of either viewership or gameplay, extending those experiences beyond their prescribed venues. As with the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) GIFs cited at the outset of this essay, users are not only able to excerpt moments of gameplay, to collect their experiences like souvenirs, but also to contribute to a community of players, sustained by these shared experiences, similar to the user dynamics that drive transmedia storytelling examined by Henry Jenkins (2008). Both GTA and the GIF, in fact, pose theft as entertainment, valorizing the act of stealing (a car, an image) to do with it what you will—play that, in other words, is not just something done in the gamespace but with the gamespace.