More than LOLCat, more than Doge, the reaction GIF has become the lingua franca of the internet. It's a perfect, economical expression—and next month, it gets its own exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City.
Jason Eppink, the museum's associate curator of digital media, took to Reddit yesterday to crowdsource submissions for the upcoming exhibition, The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture. The goal is to collectively curate and define a "canon" of reaction GIFs, which will be exhibited from March 12 through May 15.
The reaction GIF has evolved from novelty to indispensable shorthand in recent years, thanks largely to online communities like reddit and Tumblr. But while much of the time it's used as a self-contained "my reaction when" joke, as on the r/reactiongifs subreddit, that's not what Eppink is looking for. He's interested in GIFs as real, human responses, such as in a comment thread.
"I'm more interested in these reaction GIFs that have entered a common lexicon, that have emerged and share an organic use," Eppink says. "That's the distinction for me."
A perfect example is one of the select few GIFs that doesn't even need to be posted to produce the intended response: at the point, a well-executed argument or perfect pun can elicit the response "CitizenKaneClapping.gif." Not a link to the GIF, but those exact words. The GIF has been used so many times in the same situation that people recognize it from the descriptive file name alone.
For the exhibit, Eppink hopes to display 30 to 50 GIFs, each accompanied by a "verbal translation" that describes how each is used in a forum or comment thread.
However, he feels that the exhibition is as much about reddit as it is about reaction GIFs themselves. Thanks to Reddit's voting mechanism, in which relevant content flows to the top of discussions, thoughts and opinions (or in this case, reaction GIFs) that are shared by the community emerge far more easily than singular feelings. "It's not just the artifact—it's how it's used," he says. "The installation is just as much about the artifact as it is about how it's used within this community."
But while this means GIFs are once again headed to the museum (the MoMI has featured three GIF-related exhibits since 2012), Eppink is quick to quash the "is it art?" question.
"I'm really interested in how people are using media not necessarily as an avenue for artistic expression, but as an extension of how we communicate in our everyday lives," he says. "I have more of an anthropological perspective on this. I'm really interested in how these GIFs are a part of our language."
To which we say: MichaelJacksonEatingPopcorn.gif
