Creative Post
Can GIFs be art? Can they be literature? Dennis Cooper’s experiments with GIF novels raise those questions, asking us to think about the limits of literary work in the digital age. This posts asks you to practice experimental literature by creating a poem the same way Cooper created his GIF novels. You will recontextualize the banal, the obscene, the potentially irredeemable media we look at everyday by arranging them into a poetic form. Poetic forms stipulate rules (what we could understand as literary laws) for how to arrange language. Because you’ll be working in a multimodal medium, you should take poetic form as a curatorial principle or guide, rather than a strict law. The first step will be to pick a poetic form you want to use. This will help you imagine how to arrange GIFs according to formal correspondence.
Think about how to translate rhyme, alliteration, or meter into an arrangement of GIFs. You should also think about the overall structure, whether you decide to compose a series of couplets, a sonnet, a villanelle, or a sestina. The poetic form you pick should point in some direction for establishing a theme. For instance, if you pick the heroic couplet as your form, it would make sense to explore heroism. Or if you pick the sonnet as your form, you should take seriously the need to establish some tension in the first eight lines and resolve that tension in the final six lines.
In addition to selecting GIFs, you will need to create at least two of your own. I recommend GIPHY’s GIF Maker app, but you may use any platform you like. The final draft of the poem should include at least ten GIFs total and no more than twenty-five. You can begin the drafting process in WordPress by saving your work without publishing it. The animated GIFs will work in preview mode.
As you explore the limits of artistic expression, keep in mind that the line between art and obscenity always depends on context. Cooper may include semi-pornographic materials in his GIF novels, but those GIFs appear in a particular context that changes their meaning and their effect on viewers. Be mindful of your GIF poem’s context in an educational setting. You will have the chance to explain your rationale for the materials in an artist statement that will accompany the final draft. The artist statement should be 100-150 words. It needs to identify your poetic form, explain how your arranged the GIFs with that form in mind, and offer some context for appreciating the social or aesthetic value of GIF content.
Dennis Cooper Materials
- Roxane Gay, “The Blog That Disappeared”
- Casey Michael Henry, “How Dennis Cooper Turns GIFs Into Fiction.”
- Dennis Cooper’s blog
- Dennis Cooper, Zac’s Freight Elevator
- Dennis Cooper, Zac’s Haunted House (NC-17 Content)
- Dennis Cooper, Zac’s Control Panel (NC-17 Content)
GIF Poem Materials
- GIPHY, Loop Dreams
- Poetry Archive on poetic form
- Wikipedia list of poetic forms
Literature & the Internet 