Animated gifs and electronic music

I was looking at a collection of perfectly looped gifs on Buzzfeed and thinking about how they remind me of sample-based electronic music. In both cases, you’re taking a piece of a linear recording and making it cyclical. Do it wrong and it’s extremely irritating. Do it right and it’s mesmerizing. I’ve given a lot of thought to how looping a segment of audio changes its meaning, but am only just starting to think about the visual equivalent.

Like samples in hip-hop and techno, good animated gifs take something familiar and make it strange, or they take something strange and make it familiar. And like samples, gifs are especially expressive when they come from pop culture. Unlike hip-hop and techno producers, gif creators are quite anonymous; I can’t name a single one, and their work is almost always unattributed on the web.

Usually gifs are silly, but sometimes they can be moving. I like this one of a kid riding a dirtbike through the desert from Breaking Bad. No spoilers, but like every character on the show, the kid meets with tragedy; it’s nice to imagine him riding through the desert forever unharmed.

Pairing video loops with sound has so far been mostly super irritating. There’s a TV commercial in rotation right now that does that, and it just looks like an epileptic seizure. Maybe because it’s very difficult to align the optimally satisfying video loop points with the optimally satisfying audio ones. There are some wonderful video remixes based on the idea of looping short segments, but there the priority is sound; the video edits are totally nonsensical, though still satisfying in their own way.

Maybe the only way to pair audio and video loops is to have one of them necessarily be meaningless. Or maybe we should just enjoy the sample and the gif on their own terms.