In a 2009 article for The Art Newspaper, titled “With Newspapers in Terminal Decline, What Future for Arts Journalism?” András Szántó argued that museums are creating alternative and innovative media infrastructure similar to news organizations, with the result that “arts groups are getting better at telling their own stories and directly engaging their constituents.”

The acronym GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) is today mostly used to describe small annoying, blinking animations on amateur Web pages. However, it's important to remember that the file format specification is 21 years old, older than the Web itself. The first browsers didn't support GIFs, but in March 1996, with the release of Netscape 2.0, it became possible—and the face of the Internet changed within a few months. Early Web users, hungry for multimedia, were soon animating everything, from headers, backgrounds, and navigation to lists and "under construction" signs. Software tools to create these files became available for free.

In the following post, writer Maria Fusco presents a speculative first-person narrative in which an unnamed transcriber reflects on the necessity for attention, skill, and detail in his work, which ultimately serves as an analogy to the online experience and the transition away from outmoded technologies.

Lena is a caveman, into food, fucking, & self-defense. Things are simple here. Persona is a club, the world is the offending animal.

There are probably still a few Emily Dickinsons and Henry Dargers holed up with their secret creations out there in the world, but more and more artists are working in a public realm these days. This is definitely true when artists make something and post it on the Internet, and doubly true when that creation samples sounds and images. Appropriation has become a familiar creative impulse, rather than a new idiom as it was for Pablo Picasso in Pipe, Glass, Bottle of Vieux Marc (1914).