"... within all of this exponential expansion a certain format returns. repeats itself and in doing so insists upon itself. Impresses itself upon us as a series of online events. and so we surrendered to its insistence and followed them like sleepwalkers, allowing them to guide us like Virgil leading Dante into circles. circles measured in frames per second. That's how we found ourselves returning over and over in spite of ourselves to encounter with animated GIF file format whose visible music we began to hear in its temporal signatures. Its animated silence. As GIF's confront specific films/television programs- as compressed quotations, as loops constructed by reversing footage so that it travels backwards, and joins the point of origin of the shot. We found ourselves studying the ways in which GIF's studied movies. Observing the ways in which one visual regime reshapes another. How the GIF reformatted the movement of video and the motion of television into a still in order to magnify a detail within the movement of a film frozen. To extract a gesture, to be animated as a loop. As a silent infinity in this intensive, exasperatingly, medaited, seemingly trivial, trashy, trendy, flighty, flirty encounter between an existing image and a figurative project dedicated to observing it."

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The Otolith Group: Kwodo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar in conversation with Shumon Basar at Global Art Forum 9.

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