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The Morning GIF: Glitch aesthetics

No context? No problem.

 

Lorraine Murphy

Internet Culture

Posted on Feb 15, 2013   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 12:43 am CDT

Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.

When it comes to the meaning of meaninglessness, why go halfway?

Glitch aesthetics depend on the distortion of meaning: whether or not the original meaning “means” anything is questionable. This GIF removes the context entirely, inviting viewers to evaluate the distortion itself as an aesthetic object. In that sense, it’s no longer glitch aesthetics, it’s abstract aesthetics. It’s not a variant on anything; it’s a new thing entirely. Is it a beautiful thing? We think so.

The blogger at Rendering Tools says “This GIF is very beautiful to me,” and we couldn’t agree more. Interference with meaning is rarely beautiful, generally mentally processed as an irritant, but the purely abstract, as here, can easily be glorious.

GIF via Rendering Tools/Tumblr 

 

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*First Published: Feb 15, 2013, 9:28 am CST