#anthonyantonellis

This is a screenshot I took after curating various gifs and pedestals in Anthony Antonellis’ putitonapedestal.com (2011). Antonellis’ work takes place in an open gallery space, in which you are required to curate an arrangement of gifs on different pedestals. putitonapedestal.com’s visual composition is unconventional in form, often playing with visual tension between a two dimensional photograph and three dimensional animated GIFs. This unnerving and humorous interactive work is as subversive as it is playful. The composition confronts the user and their perceptions of digital media and its representation, as well as proposing a general critique of the art culture’s tendency to symbolically put things on pedestals.

The most obvious layer of Antonellis’ work is the critique of art culture. The vodka and watermelon, the coin on top of a pyramid, industrial minimalist sculpture, are a few of the GIFs that make the most obvious reference to modern and contemporary art. There are also several references to stereotypical Net culture, like the flying Windows, Beachball, and the circular blue ring. The idea of putting these GIFs on a pedestal serves as a metaphor to the Western tradition of Canonizing art and artistic movements. While the user is ironically required to place these GIFs on pedestals to create visual sense of the given composition, the objects juxtaposed with pedestals form a critique of our canonical traditions. While placing the objects on top of the pedestals, we ask ourselves why we our participating in doing so both literally and metaphorically. 

The next layer that arises out of putitonapedestal.com, is its conceptual justifications for its humorous, visually frustrating, composition. While arranging the objects in the gallery space, I found myself consistently trying and failing to make visual sense in the gallery plane. In “Media Theory and Technologies of Mediation: An Introduction”, Martin Irvine uses Lev Manovich’s book, “The Language of New Media” to ground his definition of Digital or “New” Media, in which Irvine defines pulls out five essential elements of New Media from Manovich’s book (numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding.) Irvine writes that the fifth essential element is,

“Transcoding. New media reveal a composite form from a deep “cultural layer” in the cultural use of media and a “computer layer” from the logic of computer systems and programs. Any HCI (human-computer interface) reveals this new conceptual representation, which is not simply transferring older analog media to digital form.”

Perhaps this is what’s at stake in Antonellis’ choice in using a photograph and animated gifs, instead of creating a 3d model that simulates navigating a gallery in physical reality. Antonellis intentionally creates a visual space where we struggle, but ultimately fail in believing the illusion of the gallery space. The medium confronts the user by forcing the user to openly acknowledge the gallery as a photograph, and the pedestals and objects as GIFs. As important as the GIFs’ representations and metaphors are, the GIF as a medium is equally important in putitonapedestal.com, because it points to what the user often takes for granted. Antonellis’ methodology functions in a similar way to the Abstract Expressionists and Minimalists, who use used their respective medium in a confrontational format to have the audience recognize the medium as the medium, rather than an illusion. putitonapedestal.com’s gifs and photographs function together to force the user to recognize the gifs and photographs as their form rather than their representation. As individuals constantly subsumed by the “metamedium,” we often forget the transcoding element and the unique conceptual representation that digital environments entail. We understand the vodka-watermelon as an illusion of vodka being poured into watermelon, but in fact it is an animated GIF that uniquely operates in a digital plane. Although we are presented with a photo of a “white cube” gallery space, the confrontation we have with the composition asserts that in fact, the work is not operating in a gallery space, but in a digital network. Antonellis’ is using the relationships and juxtapositions between GIFs and photographs as a method to confront users perceptions and expectations of digital space.

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