
Annoncering

Dennis Cooper: The GIF novel evolved from this thing I was doing on my blog where I would create these tall stacks of images – maybe 70 to 120 of them – that illustrated a particular theme or idea. I began introducing GIFs into the stacks, and then I became so interested in GIFs that I started making all-GIF stacks. That's when I started to notice all these really curious, unexpected things were happening in them and between them when they were combined.
Annoncering

I think the animated GIF is a super rich thing, mostly unintentionally? For the novel, I thought of them as these crazy visual sentences. But unlike text sentences, they do all the imaginative work for you. They render you really passive. They just juggle with your eyesight, and you're basically left battling their aggressive, looped, fireworks-level dumb, hypnotising effects to see the images and the mini-stories/actions they contextualise. I think, ultimately, they're mostly rhythms, or they reduce their imagery and activity, etc. to illustrative components of these really strict rhythmic patterns that turn the eye into an ear in a way.
Annoncering

It started with a series of motifs or even of things I wanted to use. For instance, I initially wanted there to be a through-line involving earth moving equipment. So I just set off in search of related GIFs. Basically, I just did what I think you can only do—use keywords plus the words "animated GIF" in a general Google image search, and also on Giphy, Tumblr, etc. And then I would add in adjectives to try to get into the less public recesses where GIFs reside. There weren't very many interesting earth moving equipment GIFs, but I found other motifs in the garbage that ended up contextualised in that category, and those were useful and ended up mutating the original motif. It's not really very different than the way I write text novels because I always construct dense subsystems in my novels involving motifs and images that work together via what I call "internal rhyming" of different sorts. The main difference formally is just that you're limited by online resources with a GIF novel rather than being limited by your imagination when it's text.
Annoncering
I've always used comedy in my books. Early on, especially in the George Miles Cycle novels, I deployed it judiciously, and it was always in service to some idea I had or another effect I wanted that I thought was more important. I used it mostly as a way to sneak up on the reader or to distract the reader vis-à-vis some impending thing that I knew would be startling and probably off-putting. So, I would think of comedy as a kind dressing and as a sleight-of-hand-like device.In Zac's Haunted House, I was coming to a medium—the animated GIF—that was largely comedic from the outset. So it was different than my written works because that costuming was already there, and, rather than figuring out how to generate humour at the right temperature and tone, it was more a matter of working as complexly as I could to generate content and emotion and tone and stuff within that preset. Even with the more horrific sequences, visually depicted horror is so tied to generating nervous laughter in the viewer and so designed to cause that reaction that, when creating sequences that were disturbing, it was always like trying put some evil clown through unusual motions.
Annoncering




Obviously, there are writers doing interesting things with internet-only material like memes, links, chat space and its language abbreviations and shorthand. But it's mostly been in short fiction or poetry forms so far, I think. I was just talking with someone on my blog the other day about the idea of a novel written entirely with emoticons. The thought arose because of that guy who wrote reviews of Tao Lin's books using only emoticons. Now that people are starting to create paragraph-length strings of them in their social media commentary, for instance, it might be possible to write long fiction with them, although it sure would be a taxing thing to read.I wonder if video clips could be interesting thing to work with, for instance. Or maybe writing a novel located in multiple, shifting locations where the sites themselves could be employed to reinvent the space around the text into something that would be plain enough not to interfere with or ick up the writing with novelty, but which could broadcast the different and dispersed contexts' qualities or purposes as backgrounding or marginal input. There must be tons of possibilities.But I don't think there's any necessity for the novel to mutate in order to live more relevantly on the internet. I think PDFs and eBooks are perfectly in tune and not overly primitive for writers who want to stick to text-only, page-based work. It's just that in every other great art form, there are artists—some of them quite popular and respected—who've studied the internet and soaked its advancements and particularities into their work, especially in music, visual art, and film, without corrupting the identity of their mediums or alienating anyone but hardcore purists. So, what's stopping the novelists?Read Zac's Haunted House here.Follow Blake on Twitter.
