A continual cum shot to the Statue of Liberty’s face. A flickering celestial ass, bent over and spreading her cheeks.Group orgy? The next wave of Internet porn? No. Just the best attended pubic call-for-art in the history of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Nearly 400 people recently packed into the MCA’s Puck’s Café for a night of Internet revelry and celebration of the animated GIF. The show was the finale to the five-part “Internet Superheroes” series hosted by the museum this past winter.Earlier this year, Amy Corle (MCA’s director of community engagement and mastermind behind “Internet Superheroes”) caught wind of the animated GIF movie that Chicago artists Jason Lazarus and Eric Fleischauer were working on and asked them to present the film at Puck’s.The film, aptly named twohundredfiftysixcolors (there are 256 colors available in an animated GIF), is an evolution of the file-making format, from its humble origins in early cinema to its prominence in late 20th-century MySpace culture and beyond. The film is also a public project, with Lazarus and Fleischauer filling their coffers by issuing an open call for GIF submissions.Fearing that prematurely showing a clip of their unfinished movie might undermine the finished project, the pair declined Corle’s invitation, and instead suggested riffing off of TWEEN, a one night animated GIF exhibition organized by TAGTEAM (Jake Myers and Christopher Smith) during which dozens of artists looped animated GIFs on their laptops until the batteries died.For Downcast Eyes, Lazarus and Fleischauer invited TAGTEAM to join them, sent out invitations to about 40 artists and issued an open invitation to the public, then hoped for the best.A blinking, jolting mess of Macbooks and young artists descended on the MCA. And it wasn’t just sex, either. There were swinging chickens, slow moving landscapes and flashing skulls. A vomiting MGM lion, the Teletubbies, and a demonic Mark Zuckerberg were all represented. I had the chance to catch up with Lazarus and Fleischauer before the show to chat open-call art, to explore the meeting point of the high and the low, and to tease out the GIF’s past, present and future.The animated GIF turned 24 this year. It’s a child of the ’80s. Is it really making a comeback?Eric Fleischauer: I mean there are people out there, when I tell them about the twohundredfiftysixcolors project, that are not even aware of what a GIF is. They think I’m saying “gift.” When you are walking around with these blinders—almost like magnifying glasses on—if you’re looking and analyzing and going through, you forget that there are people who are very smart and have no idea what you are talking about. Then you explain it and they are like, “Oh, yeah, I know what those are! What are those called?” So that’s something that I’m excited about.Jason Lazarus: Yeah, and even if they don’t ever make a GIF in their life, they are all of a sudden—much like when you see a really innovative music video or something—you have a new reference point as a participant in culture at large. The goal is not necessarily to convert a number of people. The profundity is where you are suddenly looking at digital culture in a slightly different way. It’s re-contextualizing culture at large.Read the rest over at Motherboard.
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