The stuttering GIF defines twenty-first century digital temporality against Nineties smooth loops

Evidence

This leads on to another difference from jungle and the broader tendencies in Nineties digital culture. Where jungle, like Nineties CGI, used digital technology to smooth out some of the hard lines that had been characteristic of early computer sound and imagery, footwork has deliberated opted for angularity. Charlie Frame’s comparison of listening to Rashad with “gazing at an animated GIF that grows ever more absurd with each iteration”, captures very precisely footwork’s jerky repetitions. Perhaps the appeal of the animated GIF and of footwork are both tied up with the way that they reject the dominant aesthetics of digital culture now. Think of the way that the elastic architectures of Nineties animatronics gave way to the dreary photorealism of contemporary animation. Now, novelty is to be found in the refusal of communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness. If the Nineties were defined by the loop (the “good” infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s “Timeless”), then the twenty-first century is perhaps best captured in the “bad” infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a timetrap. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1332

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s earlier chapters on hauntology, time-traps, and the bad infinity of looped temporality (chs 66, 53); the good versus bad infinity distinction is a Hegelian echo. — connects to: Digital memory lacks the living, retranscribed temporality of real memory; Digital-native generations experience time as disconnected micro-slices — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 53; Time-space compression from flexible accumulation generates a crisis of representation in cultural forms — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2035 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Time-space compression from flexible accumulation generates a crisis of representation in cultural forms #corroborates (0.72) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 2035