Annie Felix: .GIFs as a Site of Digital Puppetry

Donald Glover with puppet

In thinking with and of the .gif, I’ve started to conjugate it, and thus my research work has become the practice of .gifing. To .gif some event (a performance: movement/ gesture, an affect, an animation, etc.) is both to capture it into that particular file format and, philosophically, to encase it in a never-ending autonomous repetition. Me, I’ve started .gifing my recorded memories (namely home videos): repeating events – particularly for this study, bodies in reaction .gifs – that have already come severed (via mediation) from their lived realities/ contexts, temporalities. While this process (digitizing VHS tapes, saving scratched CDs left in houses I’d forgotten I’d ever been in) is interesting in itself and has consequences of its own (particularly the extracting of the event from its lived or experienced context, reality, or temporality), what I would like to explore here is the effects of this .gifing upon the extracted event.

Because gifs only support a much lower frame rate than video file formats (15 FPS compared to most digital videos’ 24+ FPS), any event that has been .gifed from video – having lost many transitional video frames in the conversion – will appear to stutter in time, animated in so jerky a fashion – movements too quick, progression too slow – as a marionette on its strings.

Sianne Ngai delves into the affective implications of this jerky animatedness, this puppetry that a .gifed event implies in her book Ugly Feelings (2007), thinking it together with racialized subjects. She writes of the affects produced by the aesthetic appearance of animatedness/ puppetry (a jerkiness in movement as though an invisible string is being pulled) as something that reinforces negative racial stereotypes. For Ngai, the affect of animatedness is ambivalent: to appear as though a puppet being controlled by strings is not necessarily to be controlled as such. She writes,

“While animatedness and its affective cousins (liveliness, vigor, zest) remain ugly categories of feeling reinforcing the historically tenacious construction of racialized subjects as excessively emotional, bodily subjects, they might also be thought of as categories of feeling that highlight animation’s status as a nexus of contradictions with the capacity to generate unanticipated social meanings and effects—as when the routine manipulation of raced bodies on screen results in an unsuspected liveliness undermining animation’s traditional role in constituting bodies as raced.” (Ngai 125)

Here, Ngai posits animatedness (the affect of puppetry) as a state that has radical potential to produce “unanticipated social meanings and effects.” She is pointing to the moments where the jerky appearance of bodies animated as such, which may be an uncanny appearance, might détourne/ co-opt animatedness’ traditional existence as completely controlled bodies moving as though by a string. Here the affect of animatedness is so in excess as to be uncanny such that what is produced is out of control puppets, once-docile and controllable bodies that have gone rogue.

via GIPHY

In the context of the .gif, these moments of excess are multiplied upon the infinite repetition. When an event, say a racialized bodily performance, is .gifed and made animated, the uncanniness of the puppet bodies is doubly so because it is continuously occurring. Thus, the iterative excess of the .gif that comes with its formal repetition has the potential to ease the affect of animatedness, its jerky progression, that it produces. 

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2007.