One thing that I have seen lately is kind of a revival of the .gif. Or, perhaps not a revival, since it never went away, but more of a renewed interest, and one with different inclinations if compared to the naïve use one could see in the begining of the web. One can see .gif’s each time more in intellectual and artistic forays: blogs on art, such as Art Fag City or Hyperallergic, the work of artists such as Michael Manning, Françoise Gamma or Petra Cortright. Blogs such as But Does it Float or This Isn’t Happiness, standards in the curation of found images on the web also regularly post animated .gifs.

There is one thing that never ceased to impress me about animated gifs: the eternal loop format. The action is repeated eternally, the same way, with no difference between the first and the tenth or millionth time. That inevitably leads me to thoughts on Sisyphus: according to the greek legend, Sisyphus was sentenced by the gods to push a boulder up the slope of a mountain. As soon as he would finish his task, the boulder would roll back to its starting point and Sisyphus would have to start it all over again. In the same way, most animated .gifs seem sentenced to the same fate.

Albert Camus, french philosopher and writer, dedicated a book to Sisyphus, ultimately declaring the greek myth the perfect depiction of the “absurd hero”. According to Camus, the absurd can be considered the feeling that is created by man’s tendency to seek a meaning to life when confronted with his inability of actually finding it. Sisyphus becomes the absurd hero when one perceives that he has no option but to continue rolling the rock at the same time he is ever conscious about it.

One recent body of work around animated .gifs is If We Don’t, Remember Me.  The tumblr displays animated .gifs based on frame captures from movies, ranging from classics of the french nouvelle vague to cult indie Napoleon Dynamite. That, of itself, is of little note: many .gifs with scenes from movies can be found around the internet. What makes this experiment so poignant and interesting is the craftsmanship in the making of each .gif and, even more, on the selection of the scenes. They are quite often somewhat calm scenes, with almost no movement – Bill Murray waking up to a young woman lying on his chest on Broken Flowers or Max von Sydow’s breathing in the Seventh Seal. What happens, though, is that one feels as if the person (or object) being depicted gets a new sense of reality. There are enough indicators to show us that it is a rather limited means of representation; and yet one cannot help but being amazed by the results. The illusion is also heightened by how well each .gif is cut: one needs to look with attention to see where the loop ends and begins.

Those .gifs, in the end, touch us because of their undeniable stillness. They will repeat forever, as Sisyphus was condemned, but, perhaps in an assimilation of Camus’ thinking, it’s as if it accepted it’s fate and had no problems – “all is well”, the french philosopher would say. Because, be it the eternal breathing of Max von Sydow’s or Napoleon Dynamite catching and throwing a ball, there is in both of them a certain beauty that comes from the painstaking repetition. And it is the same in our day-to-day lives, also permeated to an endless repetition of mundane tasks. The absurd hero is aware of the futility of acting, but also that it is through acting that one maintains awareness. There is no hope of escaping meaninglessness, but, by knowing this, one is imbued by a limitless freedom. Each one of those gif’s in If We Don’t Remember Me can represent that idea: the calm movement is continuous and immutable, the focus in one act and making it into an act that is  sublime by its sheer simplicity. It is through that that one maintains awareness of our absurd existence.