INTERVIEW w/ VANESSA LOUZON

This past year, the use of animated GIFs as a photographic medium has enjoyed notice, particularly in the Bond Street Gallery show curated by Laurel Ptak of iheartphotograph. A blend of narrative, motion, time, and computer-based technology, it is interesting to see visual artists using the animated GIF format as a new tool to tell their stories and play with a visual language.

Vanessa Louzon's "Ordinary Show" is a collection of animated GIFs, continually updated and displayed all together, forming what Louzon calls a "kinetic diary." Vanessa was generous in answering a few questions I had about her project; and my interest has been piqued about the presence of this format within traditional photography and media arts, and where it will go in the future. I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments on this topic.

For more information on Vanessa's work, please visit vanessalouzon.com. 

To launch Ordinary Show, click here.

1. Great Stories Can Be Told with Only a Couple of Seconds of Movement

This is That: How did the idea of "Ordinary Show" first come to you? Were you inspired by anything particular?

Vanessa Louzon: Last year, I moved from London to Tel Aviv, and I wanted to document my discoveries and experiences in a new, faraway place, with all its ups and downs. I started blogging but found writing tedious and quickly got frustrated by it. I wanted to do something more visual to tell my stories and convey my feelings.

Having been a big internet junkie for quite a long time, I really wanted to do something exclusively web-based. I thought that the internet could be an amazing medium for art, I saw it as a giant, infinite canvas, and its creative potential seemed unlimited. After extensive online exploring, I discovered a fascinating internet art underworld, and many artists who were already using the internet as a giant electronic canvas.

So I decided to do a "kinetic diary", an accumulation of small loops to represent my experiences and feelings, and not in a too literal way. I've always been interested in non-narative films, that each viewer can experience in their own way, and this is what I wanted to achieve. By accumulating on one page, the loops tell an interesting story, with no need for words or sound, like a silent deconstructed film.

TisT: Can you explain the significance behind the title? It seems to imply that one's daily experiences, being presented in diary form, can be mundane or "ordinary." On your website, you write about being interested in the "persistent repetitions of life." Does this correlate with the meaning of the title?

VL: "Ordinary Show" is a collection of ordinary experiences, but when framed and repeated, they carry a new meaning, they are frozen and separated from reality, and each clip becomes its own show. Trying to film all the little things that happen around me is quite obsessive, and the movements endlessly repeating are like our obsessive thoughts, like memories stuck in our heads, looping over and over, which are themselves ordinary.

Great stories can be told with only a couple of seconds of movement. One single ordinary micro-event repeating endlessly can tell a lot; it hypnotizes us as we are fascinated by the movement itself, but also by what it triggers in our imagination.

TisT: Can you tell me a bit about your background, and how you came to be using animated gifs of snapshots as a medium?

VL: I studied graphic design at the London College of Communication in London, then Communication Art & Design at the Royal College of Art where my work took on a more artistic approach. I wanted to focus more on video and animation. Then I discovered the animated GIF format and found it really amazing. Right away, I saw its wonderful creative potential. It was perfect for the way I was working, as it was still video / animation, but less time consuming to work with than "proper" video. With GIFs, I could work quickly, which was perfect for a diary that was to be updated on a daily basis. I also really liked the lo-fi aesthetics of video translated into GIF format because of its technical limitations, as GIFs are not really meant to support video. I thought they would look beautiful, all of them looping on the same page. Together with the giant internet canvas, I thought it was the perfect combination for my kinetic diary.

--

Thank you to Vanessa for her effort and generosity.