Can a phenomenon from the digital realm materialize?
An Animated GIF* IRL** springs from my boredom of all things digital and the grip they had taken on my life and work. However, this boredom was also merged with a strange sort of fascination. I got bored to the extent of wanting to escape the digital realm, but without leaving it. Could it be possible to instead escape into it? I wanted it to materialize. How would it look like IRL?
An Animated GIF IRL is about translating between the digital and the physical realm; transcending the digital realm. An Animated GIF IRL is a physical manifestation of its digital self, the GIF.
I was drawn to the GIF because of its connotations with the repeat surface pattern. A few images are repeated in an endless loop creating a pattern that is repeated temporally by transformation and movement. Considering the GIF using the concept of spacetime,*** the GIF is a repeat pattern in which the repetition takes place in the temporal dimension time while the repetition of the surface repeat pattern is taking place in the spatial dimensions.
The repetition of An Animated GIF IRL takes place in the temporal dimension using the body of a physical structure.
*GIF is an abbreviation for the digital file format Graphics Interchange Format. An animated GIF is a short looped animation made from GIF-files.
**The acronym IRL is an abbreviation for ‘In Real Life’
***In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space as existing in three dimensions and time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different sort from the spatial dimensions.