Who's Jamming Who Part II

Artist Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau recently led an ICA Workshop on digital screen practices, GIF-making, and the notion of ‘culture jamming’ for a group of young creatives. In the second of his ICA blog posts on the workshop, he showcases some of the GIFs produced.

At the ICA workshop I ran we collaborated on a new interruptive screen artwork using freely available online tools. The result was a series of images, memes and GIFs that were collectively edited into a digital artwork using the multimedia publishing platform NewHive.

"It's pronounced JIF, not GIF."

- Steve Wilhite, inventor of the GIF

We also interrupted the ICA website with pop ups of our gifs that appeared after users of the site had left it open for more than 60 seconds.

"A GIF [with a hard G]... That is my official position."

- President Barack Obama

From David Hall's TV Interruptions, commissioned for Scottish TV in 1971, to Random Acts, which commissions artists to make short moving image works to be broadcast on Channel 4, artists have been invited to interrupt screens for a long time. Just like the artists commissioned to interrupt the television schedules with their moving image work, our digital artworks interrupted the flow of the website visitor’s attention in a what we hope is unexpected moment of creativity. ■

Explore all of the GIFS created at the workshop on NewHive.