Group gif exhibition featuring: Ibiye Camp, Jessica Evans, Sarah Friend, Snow Yunxue Fu, Daniela Grabosch, Libby Heaney, Claire Jervert, Tamara Kametani, Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler and Caroline Sinders.

It’s 1987 and Argos have just launched their It’s So Easy ad across national television. The laminated catalogue pages in the newly opened 100th store in Derby are quivering with anticipation of shoppers perusing the wares. Clocks, double mattresses, pagers, blow-up swimming pools, instant cameras, gold necklaces, “gifts for women”, and vanity cases await.

Over in Ohio in 1987, the American online service provider CompuServe are pondering over how they can allow their clients to send images over email without taking up valuable storage space. They come up with the Graphics Interchange Format which uses a specific compression algorithm, named LZW after its three creators (Abraham Lemepl, Jacob Ziv and Terry Welch).

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For many children growing up in the nineties UK, The Argos catalogue proved a source of endless entertainment, and for many was their gateway to new technology. A brick of pages containing the country’s purchasing desires for decades. The catalogue design span 93 editions and varied as trends changed. But the format remained the same; coloured sections for various shopping categories with items collaged into relevant homely scenes. Shopping with Argos was an analogue click-and-buy, the items spread in pictorial grids impersonating a Google image search page: a pattern repeated for the catalogue 50-year run.

In a strange similarity, the way an animated GIF worked was also to identify repeating patterns. The pixels of each frame are sectioned and simplified using a 256 colour palette. Once layered to create the animation, frames are compressed using the LZW technique to reduce file size but retain image quality. Since 1987, GIFs have become more than a means to an end, and a medium in their own right defined by comedic value, cultural commentary, silence, and The Loop.

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The animated GIFs in the gifhibition are small parts of larger wholes; selected from the artists’ recent practices and experiments, the gifs are signifiers of comprehensive research projects. The gifs themselves reference old school programming aesthetics, abstract and playful imagery, as well as data storytelling and more formal programming and coding techniques that underpin the original works.

Hidden within the metadata of the gifhibition .gif file are extra snippets of text relating to Science, Technology, Engineering, (Art), and Maths, as told by the artists. Accompanying this is a fictional short text written collaboratively with a GTP-2 model trained on factual information about the history of the GIF.

-- Artist Bios
Ibiye Camp is a multidisciplinary artist using architectural tools to create films, augmented reality and 3D objects. Her past projects in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Ethiopia to investigate the glitches and tensions between digital infrastructure and the natural landscape. Exhibitions include State of The Art of Architecture, Triennale Milano, Milan (2020); Rights of Future Generation, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Sharjah; Fiction Practice - Young Curators Lab, Porto Design Biennale, Porto (2019); The Golden Age, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2016). She is a member of the all-female design collective Xcessive Aesthetics and teaches media studies at the Royal College of Art.

Jessica Evans is a digital performance artist, who received their BFA from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Employing absurdist AI dialogues and internet subcultures as her mediums, Evans’s practice explores the human conditions within virtual spaces. Exhibitions include the solo show The Perfect Moment, Radcliffe Science Library, Oxford (2017); and group presentations The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole, anonymous gallery, New York (2021); The Wrong Epicentre, Centre Del Carme, Valencia (2019); Ladies and Gentlemen, TESTT Space, Durham; and RUSKIN SHORTS, Modern Art Oxford (2018).

Sarah Friend is an artist and software engineer, specialising in blockchain and the p2p web. She is a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists; a co-curator of Ender Gallery; an alumni of Recurse Centre; and an organiser of Our Networks. Previous exhibitions include Unfinished Camp, HEK, Basel and The Shed, New York; Contingent Systems, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary; Breadcrumbs, Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne; Proof of Stake, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2021); Crypto_Manifold, Chronus Contemporary Art Centre, Shanghai (2020); and Seasons of Media Art, ZKM Centre for Media Art, Karlsruhe (2019).

Snow Yunxue Fu is a New York based new media artist, curator, and assistant arts professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Utilising topographical computer-render images, her practice merges historical, post-photographic, philosophical, and painterly explorations into a universal aesthetic of the techno sublime. Solo shows include Liminal Momentum, Duende Art Museum, Guangdong; SNOW - Submerged & Avalanche, ZAZ Corner Billboard, New York; Cavern-us: Submerged and The Night Flames, V-Art Platform, online (2021); Gorges, Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin (2020); and Karst, Ptuj City Gallery, Ptuj (2019).

Daniela Grabosch is a Vienna based artist whose performative practice migrates between digital and physical mediums. She holds an MFA in Performative Art from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and a BFA in Fine Arts and Digital Media from Hochschule Düsseldorf. Solo shows include And Then - I Entered[ed] The Deepest, Most Dug Cave, Galeria Quadrado Azul, Lisbon (2019); and Vie X Mrs, South Way Studio, Marseille (2018), and groups shows No Fundo Do Mar, Grinzing, Vienna (2020); Hydrobutter, Gomo; and Animated_Currency_01, Suzie Shride, Vienna (2019). She is the co-founder of the curatorial project YYYYMMDD.

Libby Heaney is a visual artist with a PhD in quantum physics, whose moving image works, performances and participatory experiences explore the impact of emergent technologies such as quantum computing and machine learning. Exhibitions include Interruptions, Holden Gallery, Manchester; Visionarias, Ethiopia Centre of Art & Technology, Zaragoza (2021); Real-Time Constraints, arebyte Gallery, London; OUT of TOUCH, Hervsions at LUX, online (2020); and Europe Actually, Goethe Institute, London (2019). She is currently a resident of Somerset House Studios where she is working on a major commission using quantum computing for Light Art Space and arebyte Gallery.

Claire Jervert is a multidisciplinary artist examining the impact of new technologies, such as AI, VR and androids. Through her Android Portrait series, she has met with, interviewed and ennobled humanoid robots through portraiture. Exhibitions include AI Portraiture: Us and Them, Annka Kultys Gallery, London; The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole, anonymous gallery, New York (2021); Portrait of Zuck, Galerie Manqué, New York City (2020); Duty Free, isthisit?, London (2018); and Android Portraits, International Symposium of Electronic Art, Hong Kong (2016). She was a recipient of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship in 2009.

Tamara Kametani is a visual artist based between Athens and London whose research encompanses border politics, surveillance and privacy, and the proliferation of technology, with a focus on the construction of contemporary and historical narratives. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Practice: Public Sphere, from the Royal College of Art. Recent exhibitions include It might be nothing, but it could be something, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2021); TransLocal Cooperation, Furtherfield, London (2020); Swayze Effect, Platform Southwark; For the Time Being, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2019); and [ENTER], Triennial of Photography Hamburg, Hamburg (2018).

Angeline Meitzler is a Filipino American artist, writer and software worker based in Brooklyn, currently studying for a MA in Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a MA in Fine Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Performances and exhibitions include The Terminal: Human Shaped Whole, anonymous gallery, New York (2021); 24-HOUR DRONE, Basilica Hudson, New York; Initial Public Offering, Reddit, online (2019); and Beyond The Hashtag: Failures and Becoming, HTMlles Festival, Montreal (2018). She is a member of Soft Surplus and Surplus+.

Caroline Sinders is a critical designer, researcher and artist, addressing the intersections of artificial intelligence, intersectional justice, systems design, harm, and political conversation in digital spaces. She’s worked with the United Nations, Amnesty International, IBM Watson, and the Wikimedia Foundation. Exhibitions and projects include Within Terms and Conditions, The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Dreaming While Awake, Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, New Orleans; Architectures of Violence, Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco (2021); Higher Resolution, Tate Exchange, London (2019); and Feminist Data Set, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2018).