from the 256 project

By Jason Foumberg

It seems like centuries have passed since the term “cyberspace” sparkled with hope for a technological utopia where we could zip along the information super highway direct to the future. That route, if you recall, was plastered with animated GIFs, those cartoonish website animations of such snazzy effects as rainbow text spinning on its axis and dancing emoticons. The Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, was a primitive tool, producing pixelated images in limited color palettes and, like many things that live and die on the Internet, was quietly replaced by more complex codes and software. Yet, as long as there is old technology there will be old-technology enthusiasts, and the animated GIF, like many other bad habits from the 1980s, is making a comeback in a big way.

Visual artists are on the front line of the GIF renaissance, and it’s not a big leap to consider animated GIFs as artworks. They can be entrancing, visually punchy, funny, strange or boring, and many have become iconic. Artists are not only creating new animations in the 8-bit format, but also constructing complicated GIFs using new software, and others are acting in a curatorial way to harvest classic GIFs from the early Internet, archive them, and re-present them in educational contexts. Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Briz

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Spinoza and Heidegger made similar points, illustrated with a hatchet and a hammer respectively, that a tool, subsumed in its utility, only truly becomes an object when broken—as do, by implication, our brains and bodies. At the end of Peter Greenaway’s 1985 film “A Zed And Two Noughts,” twin veterinarians obsessed with making time-lapse films of decaying animal corpses finally euthanize themselves before their automated camera—which ceases to function when the room is overrun with snails attracted to the rot. The malfunction, the glitch, breaches the thin line between the ideal, virtual form or function, and the electrified molecules comprising its material substance—and thus, new forms and functions arise. Read the rest of this entry »

Does something important, something spiritual, get lost when realist painters work from digital images instead of directly from life? This was the question that the distinguished painter Richard Schmid, former Chicagoan and author of “Alla Prima,” placed before a panel of fellow romantic realists at this year’s “Weekend with the Masters” in Monterey, sponsored by American Artist Magazine. Some of those artists, like Scott Burdick, Rose Frantzen and Dan Gerhartz had studied with Schmid in Chicago. Others, like Jeremy Lipking, had read his books and admired him from afar. And all of them, like Schmid, paint the truth, as they see it, about what they love: interesting people, places and things. Read the rest of this entry »

"Open Relationship"

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In an effort to define his complex attitude toward the rural Illinois landscape where he grew up and discovered that he was gay in a decidedly straight society, Dave Kube went back to his roots and came up with a series of lucid color autumn photographs of fields, barns, grain elevators, scrubland and signage in which the subject is firmly centered so that we are drawn to reflect on its significance. Across his varied subjects, Kube’s series is unified by the visual movement between openness and closure, which is a metaphor for the ambivalence he feels about a place in which he was restricted yet was also an affirming part. Read the rest of this entry »