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Artist’s Statement

The idea of the jam came to Nathan and me as we were thinking of short plots for our GIF cinema. Jam is something of an inside joke amongst me and many of my peers after TMA 185, where someone wrote a script about demonic jam that was made into a few movies. In some ways, the idea of the jam joke was similar to the cyclical nature of a GIF. It’s a joke that’s been around for us for a while, and I expect it will stick around after this. It’ll keep coming back, just like a GIF does.

Framing shots and directing actions is a much different process when you’re filming with the end product being a GIF. When the reciprocal nature of a GIF is involved in the creative process, you generally need make sure the beginning and the end of a particular frame is the same. There were a few times when Nathan and I had a shot that we wanted to put in, but we realized that we had no good way of making a loop of it afterwards. For instance, the shot where the two of us are at the table, we initially wanted me to come in and sit down at the table, but we realized that we didn’t have a good way of looping that back to the beginning. Instead, we stuck with me just standing there, which worked well enough.

The prolific nature of GIFs in our modern culture wouldn’t have been possible in a pre-digital age. In fact, the way that I personally use GIFs wasn’t possible a decade ago. One of the primary ways that I communicate with my friends is with GIFs that we send through messaging apps, including text messaging (which isn’t really solely text anymore). This harkens to the New Aesthetic, where we’re teaching machines to see like us, but we’re also learning to view the world like machines would at the same time.

For example, humanity’s shift to using GIFs and emoji to communicate in addition to text is birthing new physical technology. There’s a man who is making a robot (named Peeqo) similar to Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa, except that it communicates with us using GIFs. The concept developed enough demand that two years after this video, Peeqo is about to start a Kickstarter campaign to become a real product. Peeqo wouldn’t have been possible without the constantly evolving New Aesthetic. It’s an example of what Bridle in his talk “Waving at the Machines” illustrated as “eruption of the digital into the physical world.”