Seventeenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society

Abstract

With the widespread dissemination of memes on the internet, the importance of gifs in contemporary society has become clearer, especially for their duration and easy acceptance. These gifs that travel on social networks are based on the virality of the image used and the discursive context in which they are inserted, not on the formal or poetic characteristics of the image. The recursion of the image acts as reinforcement of a new fiction created, (re) producing meanings and the gif is created in this communicative context, resulting from the abundant representation of images disseminated by the network, it affects and redefines an aesthetic for the digital images that permeate the current life. The occurrence of repetition tends to create a homogenization and standardization of the image, thereby emptying the image of meaning and changing the perception of the contents, aesthetics and processes implicit in the work. This trend of virtualization of communication eliminates the index in the first instance and then the real, as well as the imaginative processes that need their own constructional temporality. The return of the image itself causes an apparent eternity of the image, but soon it lends itself to a different perception: the looping is intrinsic to the image, it exists as a repetition. Social networks are characterized by the production and dissemination of images in mass, without great epic, repetitive, and low intensity pretensions, instead of the mass contemplation of powerful symbols with high visibility, which was the case during the twentieth century.