What do GIFs as a practice look like today?
With support from GIPHY Arts, Rhizome commissioned ten artists to make GIFs, or GIF-adjacent works. We invited artists that don’t maintain exclusive GIF-based practices, but whose work is engaged with digital art and technology, as well as analogue media such as illustration, painting, writing, and kinetic sculpture.
While some artists chose to respond to the nostalgia that early internet GIFs often evoke, other artists situate their GIFs within complex worlds of the present, the GIF becoming a tool that helps unfold a larger narrative. Others experimented with the medium to make sense of physical projects, the GIF serving as a digital interpretation of a physical artwork or phenomenon. These works represent only a sliver of the countless ways that artists are continuing to experiment with GIFs as sites for creative expression today.
GIFs are available to share on GIPHY and have been accessioned to the Rhizome ArtBase—our archive of over 2,200 works of born-digital art.
Keep Scrolling to view GIFs are a flat circle, with works by Balfua, Taína Cruz, Scott Gelber, Mas Guerrero, Teng Yung Han, Liby Hays, Daylen Seu, Nichole Shinn, Tyler Cala Williams, and Harrison Wyrick.
Content Warning: A work in this project contains nudity.