GIFs

The year 2017 was a genuine breakthrough year for horror cinema, with multiple massive box office successes and surprising dominance on both critics lists and award shows. I’d like to look at the three successes that defined the genre in 2017 and seemed to indicate a resurgence in film’s importance to the broader landscape of horror. The horror landscape is far too variegated at this point to be adequately represented by three theatrically released movies, but they are useful objects in that we see in them a representation of the influences of TV, games, screamers, etc. These show how the cinema can serve as a point of convergence for the traditions inaugurated, emphasized, and, even, elevated by other mediums.

In the 21st century, the horror genre is defined across mediums, with video games, television, and internet-based forms as central to moving-image horror as is the cinema—and, further, the form and style of horror moves between mediums. This chapter establishes the current transmedial nature of moving-image horror by analyzing two recent films, Unfriended (2015) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018). These films eschew traditional cinematic editing and camerawork in favor of a style and structure consisting of browsing, messaging, and other networked communications taking place on a single laptop screen. This chapter also introduces the book structure that centers around a movement from sensation to narrative—aesthetics of emergence and of absorption or immersion—from works that are almost exclusively shock-based to those whose interest in the genre is firmly entrenched in telling complex absorbing stories about monsters.

The use of memes and GIFs has a significant influence on interactions in social
networks and online forums. As productions or utterances, these modes of communication benefit from thorough research works, notably led by Shifman, thus impacting
many different scientific fields—such as linguistics, semantics, and communication
studies. This situation is linked to the recent emergence of memes and GIFs, and also to
their complex intertwining of discursive, visual, and videographic signs, thus leading to
a polysemic communicative phenomenon. In this paper, I wish to show how memes
and GIFs work by analyzing scientific studies and looking at the digital dynamics in
online interaction, and on the possible impact on the offline world, in a postdigital
perspective. The aim is to propose an approach based on the communicational role
played by memes and GIFs, and also to underline the fact that they do represent a new
form of human discourse, enriched by cultural references, popular culture and individual, and collective creativity.

This book offers a unique model for understanding the cognitive underpinnings, interactions and discursive effects of our evolving use of smartphones in everyday app-mediated communication, from text messages and gifs to images, video and social media apps.

Adopting a cyberpragmatics framework, grounded in cognitive pragmatics and relevance theory, it gives attention to how both the particular interfaces of different apps and users’ personal attributes influence the contexts and uses of smartphone communication. The communication of emotions – in addition to primarily linguistic content – is foregrounded as an essential element of the kinds of ever-present paralinguistic and phatic communication that characterizes our exchange of memes, gifs, "likes", and image- and video-based content. Insights from related disciplines such as media studies and sociology are incorporated as the author unpacks the timeliest questions of our digitally mediated age.

Aimed primarily at scholars and graduate students of communication, linguistics, pragmatics, media studies, and sociology of mass media, Smartphone Communication traffics in topics that will likewise engage upper-level undergraduate students.

In midst of a huge amount of slangs, inside jokes and virals generated in the ambience of cyberspace, there is one of its most recent cultural phenomena, the meme, still an embryo with its own aesthetic logic, but that present itself in a diffuse and yet unexplored manner. We aim, in this paper, to understand this memetic potency, especially in the GIF format, in the scenario of the participative remix culture, that can be one of the keys to think the intense flux of collaborative production made by users in the networks. As such, we will use the Tumblr page “Como Eu Me Sinto Quando” as an articulator element of this investigation, bringing intriguing particularities for the observation of today’s dimension of memetic culture, as well as its rhetoric based in pop culture elements.

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Em meio a imensa profusão de gírias, piadas internas e virais gerados na ambiência do ciberespaço, está um de seus fenômenos culturais mais recentes, o meme, ainda um embrião com lógicas estéticas próprias, mas que se apresentam difusas e ainda pouco exploradas. Buscamos, neste trabalho, compreender essa potência memética especificamente no formato GIF, dentro do cenário da cultura participativa remix, que pode ser uma das chaves para se pensar o intenso fluxo de produção colaborativa disseminada pelos usuários na rede. Para tanto, utilizaremos a página do Tumblr “Como Eu Me Sinto Quando” como elemento articulador da investigação, trazendo particularidades intrigantes para a observação da atual dimensão da cultura memética, bem como sua retórica pautada em elementos da cultura pop.

This research paper is accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation that was presented at Trinity College Dublin in 2018. This research study explores representations of race and identity politics in contemporary media practices, with specific reference to the representations of minorities in meme and Internet cultures in the U.S. This paper seeks to educate and contribute to building more positive and diverse representations.

This paper received First Class Honors at Trinity College, Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

When the earth suddenly gives way under our streets and homes and in front of our cameras, the sinkhole opens a challenge to conventional ecological discourses and the capacity of those discourses to manage the scale of humanity’s environmental footprint. How the sinkhole elicits limitlessness is key to understanding the infectious nature of its visual spectacle: the parameters of time and space as we know it dissolve
before our eyes in the sinkhole’s sudden ingestion of pedestrians and automobiles, in the undertow of its void. As such, the sinkhole—and its vanishing vanishing points— demands that ecopolitics rethink how to represent endgames.

“Sinkholes.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58.2 (2019): 168-174.

muse.jhu.edu/article/717131/pdf

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=6483043

This essay investigates the formal affinities of the GIF and the sinkhole, asking both why the GIF is one of today’s preferred means of visually engaging the sinkhole and why GIFness can be found foreshadowed in the sinkhole's predigital depictions.

L’auteur propose une approche permettant de mieux saisir le rôle communicationnel des mèmes et des gifs, d’en mesurer la portée au sein des recherches en humanités numériques et de les définir en tant que signes médiatiques d’une communication interactionnelle en ligne. L’approche se veut volontairement théorique et conceptuelle tout en s’inscrivant dans une observation pragmatique des rapports sociaux numériques et des processus de création qui y sont liés, en prenant notamment appui sur des exemples de mèmes et de gifs actuellement en circulation sur des plateformes ou réseaux sociaux tels que Facebook, Twitter ou encore WhatsApp.

[Book chapter] Colorful animated key chains were popular in France in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These and other small collectible images provide a compelling case study of the growing use of promotional premiums by advertisers after World War II, in particular marketed towards women and children. Made by companies including Publirama, Visiomatic, and Vari-Vue, these images espoused contemporary visual and popular culture by using stylized artwork to picture products of post-war consumerism and by referencing cartoons and television via their distinctive, GIF-like animation.

This is Chapter 6 of my book 3D and Animated Lenticular Photography: Between Utopia and Entertainment (De Gruyter, 2015).

Keywords: History of advertising, consumer culture, popular imagery, history of collecting, optical toys

The use of the information and communication technologies (hereinafter ICT) has led to new avenues of interaction between learners, teachers and the didactic material. In the last decades, ICT have acquired a significant role in the teaching-learning process, allowing progress in both the teachers and the students' side, enhancing stimulation, motivation and information richness and manipulation. Their ubiquity and ergonomics make them vital elements in the present situation derived from the COVID-19 pandemic, with schools and universities following a remote and hybrid teaching-learning model. With the infusion of educational ICTs and internet access into classrooms, foreign language (FL) teachers must become aware of the importance of conceptual iconicity and visuals for their course content, this being in line with the internet-forward culture that characterizes modern times.
With regard to this technological revolution and the pandemic’s social impact, social networks allow students more than ever to connect and interact with other peers, teachers, friends, family and the world, in general. Instagram, with more than 1 billion monthly active users, has ranked third after Facebook (with 2 billion) and YouTube (with 1.9 billion) in terms of the most popular social media network. According to results from Sprout Social (2020), younger adults feel more attracted to Instagram than to Facebook, this resulting in a high number of users of 18-29 years old (64%). Students' interactions in social networking sites include not only written-text forms, but also still and moving image in the form of emojis, memes and GIFs (graphic interchange format). These latter, used to describe and comment on events in real life, not only enrich online interactions but are also susceptible to open interpretation, which renders their study and implementation in the FL instructional setting a rather challenging and engaging task.
This chapter, departing from a cognitivist perspective to language didactics, focuses on the role of metaphors present in GIFs (a multimodal text) as a pedagogical tool in the teaching of two basic emotions (happiness and sadness) in the Spanish as a foreign language (ELE in the native language acronym) remote classroom. To do so, research concerning metaphors and emotions in the context of cognitive linguistics is first reviewed. A pedagogical proposal addressing complex linguistic expressions to convey happiness and sadness is then presented using Instagram as an online pedagogical tool and GIFs as a didactic resource to exploit metaphorical competence. To our knowledge, no study to date has yet considered Instagram as a medium to enhance ELE learners’ engagement and communicative competence when learning emotion metaphors. It is therefore expected that this cognitive-based proposal will be implemented in the ELE classroom as well as will serve as a basis for future material creation focusing on other linguistic aspects.

This paper aims to unlock the potential for the politicization of art in the age of the meme. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s ideas, we suggest that technologies of viral reproduction create the tools and conditions for blasting the present moment out of the oppressive vice of classical historiography. While fascism retrenches on “art for art’s sake” in defense of principles of origin, authenticity, and mastery, we envision a politicization of the art of the meme not simply through content but through practice. This paper attempts to engage in this practice through creative invention. We work across two cases, one “real” (Richard Spencer gets punched) and one of our own creation: the viral life and death of Quodlibet, an anachronistic DJ. Our wager is that the blast of now-time that the meme unleashes can be used to lay bare the myth of mastery and open a space for new subjects, forms, and practices. At the same time, we show how the meme is prone to boomerang effects and reterritorializations that can reverse back into fascist aestheticism, the catastrophic status quo, and the dominance of the market. Playfully and without self-seriousness, our goal in this paper is to open the image sphere: to slip into the Internet’s dream house and rummage its drawers for a revolutionary politics.

GIFs animados cada vez mais aparecem inseridos em conver-sações online, sendo aplicados para evocar reações, ideias ou emoções, para responder e até substituir texto escrito. Neste trabalho, é explorado seu uso enquanto recurso expressivo na comunicação mediada por computadores. Além de discutir soluções visuais encontradas pelos usuários para tornar suas experiências sociais plataformas digitais mais satisfatórias, o artigo analisa verbalizações de indivíduos que usam intensamente GIFs animados em suas práticas cotidianas, obtidas atra-vés da realização de entrevistas semiestruturadas. Uma imagem (em movimento) vale mais do que mil palavras: GIF animado como recurso expressivo

Technology is a cumulative concept. Every new technology replaces previous
ones or transforms them. In this transformation, new ones can use previous
ones’ some elements. These elements may include familiar concepts from history,
art and culture. From the beginning of the 21st Century, Internet is used by worldwide
growingly and it affects the way of communication through mobile phone,
computer and television. All these new technology tools have faster, thinner and
clearer features. When these features considered, visuality has become more important
for these new tools. Therefore, these tools have been created different forms
of the image and moving image. In the last 5 years, as a moving image file format,
GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) has become popular visual element. As GIF is an
old image format from the 1980s, after solving the copyright problem in 2006, it is
used by more people and it has become popular, as it was chosen the word of the
year by Oxford Dictionary in 2012. GIFs are shared on social network sites, mobile
phones, webpages, blogs and such. There are various content types of GIFs about
politics, religion, culture and art. It seems that general reason to share GIFs is entertainment
as many GIFs have funny content. One element of the funny contented
GIFs is also failure. For this reason, this study aims to demonstrate as a new screening
format, how funny failure GIFs use previous theatrical themes; comedy and
tragedy to create funny content from real images explaining the context of funny
GIFs through failure and tragicomic concepts. Qualitative visual analysis is used as
a method for the paper. As a result, chosen GIFs are discussed in relation to their
common content such as comedy, event, source and presentation types and GIF is
considered as moving image of manipulated reality of postmodern era.