Presenting:
Downloading the Internet, 27″, 2018
found material, gif converted to video
The Great Sticker Archive
A network for art, a network as art
text/Alan Grillo
We might not have clearly noticed that we have shifted from a virtual world to a digital one. It is widely used by the mass, and inevitably accepting it to be a real tool for expression.
Social platforms and apps became cool places to literally hang out, where one can create a certain behavior as in real-life situations. It is very interesting to see how easy and fast social relations are changing there too, creating multiple layers of reality. This new ways of interchanging messages create an avatar around the user. We define who we are on a daily basis and how we want to appear to others, sending out message to the world, or more precisely, to the Network.
While this generates existential questions that can be taken in every instant, fabricated the need to keep track and follow the hundreds of “word-images”. The infinite loop of GIFs has become a crucial part of its social function and enhances its role in this Post Digital World.
Reaction GIFs or “Stickers” can be considered as the new emoticons, which have already been the quickest and easiest way for people to express their emotions digitally for the last two decades, taking out the effort of manually making a smiley face. Arguably since Stickers and Gifs have long been surpassed technologically, we are just assisting to a sort of nostalgic throwback with the reuse of a cheap vintage visual language. But that wouldn’t justify that most of the smart phones and chat services even have them built into the operating system, that designers are taking over the challenge to create new typologies of stickers and the increasing number of gif sharing platforms.
Stickers are ‘hyper’ comments, even if technically they are just animated images, conceptually they link into other dimensions. People talk with GIFs, comment and greet each other. The universe of the stickers we use holds a mirror to the way we see and use the Internet.
The limited storage for saving stickers on Wechat, China’s most prolific social media platform with over 1 Billion active users, created the need to find a way to have more stickers available at any time for the right moment: The need for the Great Sticker Archive.
This Wechat group was started merely with the intent to share stickers, so one could forward the unsaved images to other chats; but it became clear that the group soon has transformed itself into a self-defining network, creating its own internal rules and dynamics. Not only the members would have sticker requests on particular images, they’d be looking for, sometimes one sticker could trigger a ping pong of colorful and sharp animated images.
The group becomes a new spectacle, a place to hangout and use this new language.