Mind Candy: Digital Sweat Presents “GIFs to Have Sex By”

Posted on July 21, 2015, 5:05 pm
3 mins

Slide

We’ve covered a few of our favorite GIF artists in the past (and artist Erdal Inci in particular is killing it in Turkey, taking his new media art into increasingly large formats), and in these hot, sticky days and nights, it seems a good time to take a look at a new collection of GIF art that…well, is a little hot and sticky. TRANSFER gallery in Brooklyn has recently released a show (“a visual mixtape”) of GIFs from over 40 artists, curated by artist Faith Holland. The show, GIFs to Have Sex By, is a playful mix of the puerile, the abstract, the grotesque and lots in between.

GIFs by their nature are rather attuned to representing the old in-and-out, and some of the works chosen by Holland are more literal in that regard while others get downright bizarre. Very few are NSFW. And why should that matter when they are all the way over in Bushwick? Well, it so happens that Christian Petersen is hosting the full show on his online gallery, Digital Sweat. Petersen is a local artist and designer whose multidisciplinary work has recently earned him a nomination for the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award and ranges from GIF art of his own to beautiful visuals, as seen at RARE AIR events at Q Nightclub.

Digital Sweat’s purpose is explicitly for displaying shows like GIFs To Have Sex By, and the site sums it up best:

From Paleolithic cave paintings to Tumblr porn gifs, technology and the ‘erotic’ have always had a symbiotic relationship. Every new historical breakthrough in visual technology has almost immediately been adapted to produce or display sexual content. It is therefore interesting that New Media artists, who adapt and subvert digital technology and media, have on the whole, been slow to explore these themes. Perhaps the overwhelming saturation of overtly sexual and pornographic material in the modern world has rendered the genre unfashionable and impotent, overwhelming the desire to make more creative expressions of the subject.

Featured artists include V5MT, Giselle Zatonyl, Mark Dorf, Petersen himself and Adam Ferriss, who has an absolutely brilliant, cerebral and moving show at Interstitial Gallery right now. See a sampling of the still images below, then hop over to the online gallery to see everything in motion. They say the internet is forever when it comes to dick pics and nudes, but this digital show ends this weekend, July 26.

PS: Regarding sex and the internet being forever, this show is well-timed when the AshleyMadison security debacle is so rapidly unfolding. And regarding the mayhem that is probably going to ensue if its user data is released JUST before an election year…well, I have another gif for that:

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T.s. Flock is a writer and arts critic based in Seattle and co-founder of Vanguard Seattle.

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