In collaboration with Lauren Sinner.
Internet culture has completely transformed the way we communicate with one another. These modern communication methods that hyper-connect us to the world lack the gestural nuances previously used in verbal language. Many of these cues like rhythm, inflection, volume, or gestures are lost in the digital world. This often causes a loss of information, as do most things when being converted from analog to digital, and thus the rise of the emoji & GIF come to fill the void. The GIF, for example, a small looping animation, can convey a very particular emotion or idea separate from its original context. GIFs have become so synonymous with online forums, message boards, or chats that they are now a vital aspect of the internet’s lexicon understood by the larger community.
The first iteration of this concept manifests through a GIF that we have broken down into individual frames, transcribed into line drawings on fabric, hand embroidered, and then reconstructed back into a GIF. The juxtaposition between the fleeting interest of internet culture and the time-intensive, repetitive actions of embroidery questions what is lost when we do not use written or spoken language to communicate. Instead, we focus on gestural image-based and tactile communication that can better represent what we are trying to say. Our aim with this project is to reproduce that experience, not a specific narrative.