Jiggling Golems explored the cinematic qualities of the GIF medium, the narrative potential of very short moving images and their semiotics. In the context of the Festival for Silent Film Culture, the GIF art exhibition expanded the silent film format in the networked digital space. The project was realised as an ‘immaterial’ exhibition in html format, hosted within the open-source local networking toolkit ‘Piratebox’ and traveling along the venues. The audience could access the exhibition only on-site through their mobile devices.

Venue: Goethe-Institut Athen, Circuits and Currents, Athens, Greece, March 2015
Partners: Braunschweig University of Art (Germany), Athens School of Fine Arts, Moving Silence Network (Berlin-Athens), Circuits and Currents (Athens)
Fund: Goethe-Institut Athen
Art director: Matthias Fritsch

jiggling golems

jiggling golems

jiggling golems

Flash fiction curatorial text:

Gifs, the stray protocols breed inside the dot matrix. Once liberated from their corporate pimps, this batch of hyper-hookers was destined to hangout in the downtown of stocked networked space. Rambling along the data streams, these jiggling golems were soon crowdsurfing in every corner of the alleged Web 2.0, triggering the reticulated, blurring the realtime, entering our retinal trans consciousness.

When Walter Benjamin referred to the mythοlogy of modernity he identified it through an excessive visual complex, dialectical images of a dissipated externalized as well as internalized fictitious realm. Non linear narrativity and spatial dispersion at the borderlines of contingency and experience. Gifs fabulate inside the collective effervescence, mutating the spectacle into detached fickle imageries, an abundant realm of viral correspondence infecting our most tacit, impulsive, trivial and absurd, glimpses of imaginary.

In the uncanny cyber valley, timespace circulates in inhuman routes. A friction of agitated semblances, rubbing against each other inside a narrative sludge. Visual residues get mutated into events that once were fiction, into fiction that was events, in an infinite mashup of dislocated visions. History as we know it relegates into just another story, one of many that transcendent the actual facts of our newtonian space. Gifs blossom in this ecology of fused multi-narratives and hyperlinked projections, catching up in the net fleeting units of a vast ocular feedstock, stimulating junctures, recontextualizing the ruptures, assembling and rendering jargons, flocking semiotics for the rapture of the gaze, an orgy of the sussed but inexplicable.


gif1: artist Nicolas Boillot Through custom code and user interface environment

gif2: artist Vince McKelvie

gif3: The Insects’ Christmas by Vladislav Starevich (1911). Vladislav Starevich was a Russian and French stop-motion animator notable as the author of the first puppet-animated film. He also used insects and other animals as protagonists of his films.