Gif Cinema

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         Repetition: brushing teeth, combing hair, walking, eating, resting. Waking up. Falling asleep. Working. Life twists back on itself. Schedules and structures and circular moments make up our existence. Before we have a chance to recognize our reality, our body has aged and warped, while our mind floats in the circulature of existence. We are ageless in our repetitions.

        It’s a little strange, then, that I've ignored this repetition in my past narratives. Strict linear structures. Point A to Point B. People waiting for moments to irrevocably change their existence when, in reality, those quiet tooth-brushing wake-sleeping loops form the foundation of our lives. We are all part of an endless cycle of existence, but I generally choose to highlight life’s linearity.

        Making a story based strictly on loops and cycles was difficult. Everything sublime, in my mind, came from the integral changes I associated with linearity. People can’t change if they exist in a loop, and change is the foundation of good storytelling. Loops, however, are the foundation of good GIFs.

        So how do you rationalize the two? A looped structure and the idea of change? I didn't want to focus my narrative on day-to-day, but I wanted to do something cyclical. Something on a grander scale than brushing teeth, but something that still reflected mentality. A life/death, give/take that could be read forwards, backwards, or started at any time during the narrative. I don’t know if my gif cinema ultimately read that way, but that’s what I was going for.

Interactivity/immersion

In the beginning of Murray's chapter, she discusses the physical distance placed between ourselves and the encompassing worlds of media. Older media, such as books, theater, and television, rely on analog pages and sedentary interactions to keep the consumer grounded in the physical world. In the case of video games, however, the user physically interacts with and--to a varied, limited extent-- controls their environment. The player is more causally connected to the media's world, but the reality of the controllers, keyboards, and phone screens act as distancing artifacts. 

In my experience, I've had an easier time immersing myself in the more traditional forms of media: text, performance, and direction as forms of storytelling. In an almost counter-intuitive way, the worlds I engage fully with are not the worlds where I have the physical connection. Video games give me sentience in a narrative world, but they don't necessarily sweep me into that world. 

Interactivity and immersion seem to have an inverse relationship when it comes to narrative. The Prince of Persia movie immerses me much more than the Prince of Persia video game, despite my actual physical interaction with the video game.

When it comes to immersion in media, body mindfulness is the enemy. Anything that brings you out of your mind and into your body disrupts full psychological engagement with a story. Even virtual reality games, where the experience is supposed to be fully immersive, still encourage the inherent barrier of body mindfulness. No matter how realistic the VR skiing experience, computers can't recreate physical touch.

Books, movies, and theater, on the other hand, don't encourage body mindfulness. In fact, they discourage it. Movies and stage performances shut off surrounding lights and sounds, dumping a fully-formed, non-interactive story onto a stationary audience. Aside from occasionally turning a page, people sit still and absorb the narrative in a book. The sedentary consumption of old media forms enables consumers to detach from their bodily awareness and dive deeper into the media.

The "New Aesthetic"

Digital interpretations and manipulations of real-world imagery. Snapchat filters, for example. Our image is absorbed by a digital entity and displayed back with pre-programed tweaks and tricks. We read the imagery as us, but it still intrinsically carries the warped foreignality of digital medias. A program captures our image, our identity, as data and plays it back to us in novel ways. We recognize that the image isn't necessarily us, yet we still identify with it. On a more subtle level, we experience this digital aesthetic, this interactive phenomenon, with front-facing cameras. Selfie cameras warp our image instead of reflecting it. Whether it warps through specific intent--making our eyes slightly larger, for example-- or through user-friendly convenience--mirror-imaging our photo to better match our own perspective of self--the digital world leaves its own distinct interpretations on our reality.

We also have real-world manipulations of digital interactions. Heat signature cars emitted from tanks. Marine camouflage meant to confuse both humans and machines. Alternatively, however, this same aesthetic exists as an enunciation of digital properties. "Pixelated" buildings or public art pieces fit into this category as well. In our interactions with digital media and a digital world, we have developed an aesthetic comprised of ways to trick and/or embrace the other party.

Colloquialized digital manipulations exist, for example, as masks. Martin Backes created a pixelated street mask that, although giving the impression of a digital face to normal humans, fools facial recognition software. People read the mask as a digital interpretation of reality, while actual digital software cannot interact with it as intended. Snapchat filters cannot recognize Backes's mask as human enough to manipulate, while real people see the mask as a reflection of low-res or problematic coding. Backes's mask employs the new aesthetic to float in a digital/reality middle-ground, disconnected from humanity, disconnected from new medias, all while existing as a product of both.