I don’t know why I never realized that my feelings of “when my friends try to get me to go out after I eat a big meal” could be so perfectly summarized by a repeated moving image of Ash, Misty, and Brock trying to roll Snorlax out of the road. I laugh, watch a few more loops, and scroll to the next post. I do not stop to wonder why this Pokemon scene, with its few choice words, elicited more emotion from me than when I watched the actual show.

The June 15, 1987, specification by CompuServe Inc. says that the GIF “allows high-quality, high-resolution graphics to be displayed on a variety of graphics hardware” and refers to the GIF as “87a.” But given how quickly the Internet develops, it is a wonder that GIFs have not yet fallen into obsolescence. Unlike a video, it cannot support sound, and its color palette pales in comparison to JPG’s. The format’s spec was last updated in 1990. Things that were also last updated in 1990 include the original proposal for the World Wide Web and the Clean Air Act. And yet, the plethora of GIF-filled “What Should We Call Me” Tumblrs and otherwise banal BuzzFeed articles attests to the GIF’s incredible longevity.

An Internet Lingua Franca

It seems that the GIF, as a medium, owes its success partly to its accessibility. Websites like gifmaker.me and makeagif.com allow users to compose animated GIFs for free; an app called GifGrabber allows you to capture online video to convert into a GIF; for those with Photoshop, there are multitudes of how-to articles that generally consist of six or fewer steps. Unsurprisingly, animated GIF-makers range from serious artists to kids experimenting on a new computer. Their products are then usually uploaded and if they are lucky, shared.

Online, the most common use of the GIF is as a vehicle for emotion, taking a scene where David Tennant of Doctor Who stares pitifully up at something in the pouring rain underneath a caption like, “When your friends hang out without you.” The GIF’s loop serves as its own emphasis, reiterating the emotion to the point of absurdity. We watch, absorb, empathize, and inexplicably laugh.

In essence, the GIF survives not only because everyone can make one, but also because everyone can partake: it has the ability to draw us into some strangely eternal moment. Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg are the creators of Cinemagraphs, GIFs that are almost completely stationary save for a small detail—a fluttering hair, fabric waving in the wind, gleaming sequins. “Whatever that one thing is that is alive is what your eye is going to go to,” Beck explains. “You look, and you feel like you should look away, but then you can watch it, and you can watch it some more.” Unlike photos, she suggests, the realistically animated GIF suggests life in a picture that isn’t just pixelated flatness. The added repetition then further indulges our instinct to stare, almost like infants at a dangling mobile.

The Art of Paraphrasing

The ability of GIFs to provoke both laughter and voyeurism indicates another powerful feature: exaggeration. The short, unceasing loop can repeat “Oh my God Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re white” until it calls to our minds not only the words in the scene, but also the bizarre effect of using this movie scene out of context, and more importantly, the unexpected appropriateness of this out-of-context appearance. An appropriated GIF is not only repetitive in its animation, but also serves as an amusing or thought-provoking echo of a previous work.

So we find that many popular GIFs are indeed appropriations. Is it possible for GIFs to ascend to the level of “art” if GIFmakers simply borrow and tinker—if the “art” of GIF-making turns out to simply be the art of paraphrasing?

Of course, GIFs are not simply stolen movie scenes. They take a certain amount of technical skill to create, and even after that, many take advantage of the additional flexibility to superimpose meme-like captions. From subtitling Doctor Who and Mean Girls GIF-sets to imposing the ever-edgy “In that moment, I swear we were infinite” over a flashing nebula, text on GIFs has added new levels of expression to the medium. (Even more amusing is the imposition of Nietzsche quotes over GIFs of Honey Boo-Boo.) GIF artists have gone as far as to jazz up classic works of art. Particularly notable are GIF modifications of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and M.C. Escher’s Relativity. The latter is more of a satire, showing a man tripping down an escalator imposed on one of the lithograph’s three staircases. There are multiple GIF edits of Starry Night, though, including ones that make the sky’s swirls come to life or cause the water to gently ripple. The final piece is no Van Gogh—but then, it really is.

There remains an uneasy conclusion that as long as the editor contributes or re-contextualizes something, they may have created “real art.” Perhaps the Internet users who put scenes of badly-made infomercials together with text descriptions of awkward social situations exercise the same sort of artistic license as Duchamp did with his Fountain, a porcelain urinal inscribed with “R. Mutt,” which one critic described as having “created a new thought for that object.”

Toward Originality

Joseph Koerner, a professor of history of art and architecture at Harvard, explains that following Duchamp’s readymades, “the idea of being true to a medium was becoming more and more important.”

“A painting is really just paint and a canvas,” he continues. “Artists traditionally would paint a bowl of fruit, which doesn’t make obvious the medium; that’s when we have Jackson Pollock, whose paintings are simply paint and a canvas.” This progression from appropriation to reduction pushes for a more critical look at what exactly a medium as a medium, instead of a vehicle for content, is capable of.

For GIFs, this suggests that the future of the medium lies somewhere outside mini recreations of SpongeBob scenes. A more recent development is the growing popularity of a new GIF genre: ones that are purely GIFs, that only ever existed as GIFs. From Paolo Ceric’s hypnotic, writhing shapes to Skip Hursh’s bold and bright animations, GIF artists have also ventured into the territory of using a GIF’s repetitive movement for its own sake. This is a new take on an old medium, and forces the artist to use a loop but without drawing on the already existing power of other art pieces.

Colin Raff, a Berlin-based artist and writer, runs a Tumblr on which he posts original GIFs that have been described as surreal, grotesque, and violent. He decided to use GIFs as an intermediate step between static art and short films, and discovered in it a medium that could combine the elements of an illustrated story, an animated short, and an exhibit. One of his particularly popular GIFs depicts a well-dressed man thrusting a wheel-like object into his face as a goat peeps in through the window. In the process, his eyes fall out.

The entire black-and-white scene is, mildly put, disturbing. But as evidenced by the 12,000 notes and my own prolonged stare, it is bizarrely entrancing. As Beck suggested, perhaps we are drawn to the seemingly living movement in a picture. Perhaps in combination with something that so clearly should not be living, we find it difficult not to stare at its repeated movement.

Indeed, Raff attributes the success of GIFs partly to the idea of perpetual motion. “Arguably, many don’t need to move,” Raff admits, “but so what? The possibility is available to the artist much like the arbitrary decision to add gouache to an ink drawing.” It is precisely this possibility that makes GIFs the source of so much creativity. The choice to enhance visual appeal with a movement that catches the eye and implies life is not an unforeseen one, especially if GIFs can extend this movement into perpetuity. It is this balance between a movement that is true to life, and the repetition that, in all its variations, reminds us that this moment is unnaturally suspended.

Our inability to tear ourselves away from GIFs, then, is more than a product of procrastination; its very form rewards our continued attention. A GIF is at once lifelike and not; it suspends a movement in time but allows us to consume time by watching it over and over. Whether as an advanced emoticon or a particularly artful animation, the GIF stops time to replay a scene, drawing viewers from all recesses of the Internet. Its content is rarely never-before-seen, so its power depends mainly on its form’s ability to evoke a tension between repetition and the freezing of time. But unlike other types of media that strive to make you look again, GIFs make sure that you never stop looking.